When ice cubes become more than a beverage chiller …
Yes. You heard us right. Smart Ice Cubes. How can frozen water be smart? Impossible, one may think. But leave it up to a student at MIT to create the possible out of what some may deem impossible.
After a night of debauchery and wreaking havoc, Dhairya Dand, MIT media lab researcher, ended up in a blackout-state at the hospital because he had more than one too many cold ones.
While most college students would wake up, dust off their battle wounds, show-off their hospital bracelet to all their buddies and do it all over the following weekend, Dhairya Dand saw this as his opportunity to create a tool that changed the way people drink for the better. He named them Smart Ice Cubes.
Now for the brains behind the cubes: The cubes are made out of edible gelatin and are engineered to flash LEDs to the beat of party music (cool!). Each cube contains a coin cell battery, an ATtiny micro-controller and an IR transceiver. The cubes use these elements to track the number of sips you’ve had and the total amount of time you have spent drinking. Essentially, the cubes are reading how fast and how much you are drinking. The cubes change colors while in your drink to give you an indicator as to how safely you are drinking. The spectrum starts with green, moves to orange and finally lands on red. When you’ve reached red, this is an indicator that you are drinking beyond your safety limit.
A clever feature of these cubes is that when you continue to drink past the safety limit, the cubes send a text message to a friend from your smartphone to let them know you may need some assistance. CRAZY!
Click here to watch Dhairya’s Vimeo video of his awesome product.
With spring just around the corner and the onset of barbecues, brewery tours and outdoor sporting events galore, our discovery of these Smart Ice Cubes couldn’t have come at a better time. Happy safe drinking to all!