Procter & Gamble may be 183 years old, but last year marked its first appearance at CES, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas. The company is appearing today with the same game plan — to make ordinary products better with AI, sensors, and other tech.
At one of the first official events of CES 2020, P&G showed off a connected baby care system, a toothbrush with real-time feedback on how well you’re brushing, a smart fragrance diffuser, a razor designed so you can shave someone else, and the Opte blemish remover that drew crowds to my face last year.
Lumi
Above: Lumi helps you track your baby.
I’m going to refrain from calling this first invention smart diapers. But that’s what comes to mind with Lumi by Pampers.
P&G calls this the world’s first all-in-one connected baby care system. It updates traditional baby monitoring by combining a video monitor with an activity sensor to offer parents a real-time holistic view of their baby’s sleep, feeding, and diapering patterns — all in one place.
The company said Lumi transforms the data into tangible, personalized insights and actionable tips to support parents as their baby develops and grows. By blending real tracking insights with their own intuition, parents can know, at a glance, how their baby is doing and anticipate their offspring’s needs.
Smart toothbrushes
Above: Oral-B Sense toothbrush gives you real-time feedback.
Oral-B Sense is a toothbrushing system with a Wi-Fi-enabled base that provides real-time feedback to your mobile device while you brush. By combining brushing technology with data tracking, Oral-B Sense promises to empower consumers with personalized information to build healthy habits and improve their oral health over time.
It also offers voice control with Alexa built in so you can make your routine more fun and productive with hands-free access to music, weather, and news. You can even control your smart home or order replacement brush heads with the voice controls.
The brush is water-resistant and has a compact base that fits on a sink counter and uses a single power outlet. The four-segment LED timer tells you when to switch to a different part of your mouth, when you’re brushing too hard, and when you’ve hit the two-minute mark.
Oral-B Connect keeps track of your progress over time, like a fitness tracker for your mouth. You’ll find tips on how to improve your brushing, as well as personalized oral care insights.
Oral-B iO toothbrush
Above: Oral-B iO
Oral-B iO features a magnetic drive that smoothly delivers power to the tips of the bristles, allowing the brush to glide tooth by tooth. At the heart of the Oral-B iO is a linear magnetic drive system. It also has a smart pressure sensor that helps you brush correctly by displaying green when you apply the right level of pressure or red if you brush too hard.
A display lets you navigate personalization features. It has welcoming greetings, a choice of brushing modes, language settings, and reminders to change the brush head. The Oral-B iO app provides 3D graphics, with Oral-B iO AI Brushing Recognition technology to make sure you reach all the areas of your mouth.
Smart fragrance
Above: Airia can distribute fragrances through your whole home.
Airia is a smart fragrance system that gives you the ability to change the ambiance of your home with the touch of a button. It enables precise minute-to-minute control of the scents in your home, and it can turn them on or off at specific times of day. Sounds a lot like rival Sensorwake to me. But Sensorwake is just an olfactory alarm clock, while this lets you send scents throughout the house.
The app allows the user to control the desired bold or subtle scent level on a scale from one to 10 to fill a small space or up to the whole first floor of a house. The app tracks cartridge life, alerting users when it’s nearing time for a refill, and easily allows for refill purchase. The device is Wi-Fi-enabled and compatible with iOS and Android mobile devices.
Better razors
Above: Gillette Treo lets you shave somebody else.
P&G’s GilletteLabs is showing off two razors laden with tech. The Gillette Treo razor is designed specifically to let you shave someone else and is targeted at caregivers to help them take better care of their loved ones.
And Gillette is bringing back the heated razor, which provides a customizable shaving experience with its stainless steel warming bar and new FlexDisc technology to contour your facial features. The FlexDisc maximizes contact with the warming bar, which heats up in less than a second. It will also be available for purchase in the LifeLab.
P&G Ventures’ Opte
Above: Opte removes your blemishes, temporarily.
One of the products coming back to CES for a second run is the Opte Precision Wand, which has been in the making for more than 10 years. You move the wand over the spots on your face, and it will spray Opte’s Optimizing Serum over them, making them disappear as if you had applied the perfect amount of makeup.
P&G showed Opte off at CES 2019, but it didn’t ship last year. I assume the company is taking in feedback and continuing to refine the product.
Opte scans, detects, and corrects hyper-pigmentation on your skin. It only puts serum on the areas where you need it, and it helps spots blend in with the rest of your skin by dispensing a custom blend of serum one billionth of a liter at a time. The serum contains moisturizing and mineral ingredients that promise to help you achieve naturally beautiful looking skin while reducing the appearance of spots over time. Sadly, it doesn’t last. Like makeup, you have to put it on once a day.
Author: Dean Takahashi
Source: Venturebeat
