It seems like we are on a watch frenzy mode! We have recently covered the planetarium watch and the conceptual design for iWatch. However, the watch we will be talking about today is unlike you have seen so far. You will agree that conventional watches with all the alarms and beeping are at times stressing for the user. So a new concept for the watch was envisioned by Aisen Caro Chacin and a prototype has been created that will make use of scents to tell the time to the user.
The designer is a physical computing lecturer and works at the Parsons New School for Design, New York. Four perfume bottles were employed and fragrances associated with different times of the day were used to come up with this prototype watch. It basically enhances the sense of time by releasing scents and hence, does it without adding any stress.
The gadget is being called the ScentRhythm and is quite bulky owing to the fact that it comes with four bottles of fragrances and the mechanics which allow for the releasing of these scents. The scents included correspond to the time of waking up, relaxing moments, activity time and sleeping time. 10 ml of scent is included in each bottle and the watch fires away a whiff of scent every 6 hours for the prescribed time.
Just to give an example, the user may wake up to the aroma of coffee being wafted by the watch or might be sleeping to the scent of chamomile. As expected, the watch does not sport the conventional clock’s display. The mechanism for firing away scents has been made possible by piexoelectric atomizers that are placed below each vile of scent and are triggered by watch’s electronics, eventually resulting in the release of scent. The atomizers respond to ultrasonic frequencies which cannot be picked up by humans and these ultrasound waves will be transforming liquid into vapor.
The watch employs the use of a lithium-ion battery which runs for 24 hours after a complete charge that can be carried out via micro-USB. The designer said; ‘Olfaction and chronoception are both chemical senses, so I thought it would be interesting to map them onto one another.’ She also said that the watch is just a concept and will not be in the market anytime soon.
She further writes on her website; ‘This device attempts to keep a chemical watch on the circadian rhythm [the body’s daily 24 hour cycle] by administering fragrance and supplement concoctions associated with the daily activity of the moment to promote the production of certain neurotransmitters, such as chamomile and melatonin during sleep, espresso and caffeine during the awaken state.’
