Fat-tracking smart belts and two other crazy wearables Samsung will debut at CES 2016

Eager for the latest CES scoop? Curious what’s on the horizon for cutting-edge wearable technology? Excellent, because Samsung’s employee-driven Creative Lab (C-Lab) has just announce three unique wearables that’ll debut at CES 2016, and they’re ambitiously out there.

These include the WELT, a wearable smart belt that tracks your waist; Rink, a hand-motion controller for mobile VR devices; and TipTalk, an intelligent watch strap that lets hear sounds from gadgets like the Samsung Gear 2, without headphones.

This may seem like a mishmash of ideas, but that's exactly the scope of C-Lab, which is an internal program aimed at letting employee pursue their own pet projects similar to Google’s former 20% policy.

WELT is described as a “smart wearable healthcare belt” that camouflages as a with normal belts, except that it offers its wearable the ability to record waist size over time, and tracks their eating habits, the number of steps per day, along with the amount of time spent sitting. The data is then transferred (via bluetooth?) to a smartphone app, that plots your rampant self-destruction as a chart over time, presumably to motivate you.

Rink on the other hand, is like a smart strap that's worn over — you guessed it— your hand to provide a “more intuitive and nuanced way to interact with the virtual world.” That's all we know for now. It resembles a VR controller of some sort.

Next we have the TipTalk, a slightly weirder smart strap aimed at watches both smart and analog. TipTalk reportedly lets users hear sound from their smartwatch after touching a finger to their ear, Secret Service-style. Doing so is supposed to enhance call clarity in noisy environments by “transmitting sound their the user's body.” How this works— and more importantly— how this works with analog watches is unknown.

With EP on its way to CES, we'll have the opportunity to update you as we try them. Part of Samsung's goal in showcasing these objects is to determine their market potential. Since C-Lab first launched in 2012, 70 projects have already been completed, with nine considered high potential.

Source: Samsung