SOME people like their cellphones to ring, others prefer them to vibrate. Now a modern Frankenstein has brought them to life so that we can monitor their vital signs instead.
Fabian Hemmert at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, has programmed a phone to vibrate with a steady “heartbeat” that races in excitement when it receives a call and fades away as the battery runs low.
Some of the volunteers who carried Hemmert’s “ambient life” phone around for a day felt reassured by the feedback that the phone was “present and calm”,…
