This Simple Chip Could Turn All Your Clothes Into Activity Trackers
These little chips may not look much, but in fact they're a new breed of super-small, super-cheap accelerometers that could make motion sensing ubiquitous—even in the clothes you wear.
The chips, made by mCube, measure just a couple of millimeters across—less than half the size of most accelerometer chips. Perhaps most importantly, though, they're more power efficient and cheap, too. That's because they integrate the mechanical device for detecting movement and circuitry that processes the signals into a single chip.
Combining the two parts on a single chip also makes them incredibly accurate by providing a cleaner signal. In fact, mCube reckons the dinky little device is so accurate it could replace the gyroscope in a smartphone—so it could bring motion sensing to even the cheapest of phones.
