App-connected hairbrush will teach you to brush your hair better
You could be brushing your hair all wrong -- at least according to L'Oreal's new smart hairbrush.
Called the Kératase Hair Coach, the brush uses an array of sensors and an app to "coach" users into brushing their hair more efficiently.
The Wi-Fi enabled hairbrush is powered by Withings, and connects to your phone so you can track data it collects. The battery-powered brush is equipped with five sensors: an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a conductivity sensor, load cells and a microphone.
The way your hair sounds as it's brushed matters.
The accelerometer and gyroscope detect motion (which direction you are brushing your hair); the conductivity sensor tracks whether your hair is wet or has product in it; and the load cells detect how forcefully you brush. Of course, none of those things will actually tell you about your hair itself, which is where the microphone comes in.
The microphone enables the accompanying smartphone app to tell you how healthy your hair is. According to L'Oreal's researchers, the way hair sounds as a brush moves through it changes based on how dry the hair is.
Using these sounds, the app is able to provide a score of how healthy your hair is and recommend a line of (L'Oreal) products and other steps you can take to improve your hair, like brushing less forcefully or in a different directions, for example.
All this data doesn't come cheap: the brush will cost a little less than $200, according to the company, which hasn't landed on an exact price yet. It's slated to go on sale in the middle of 2017.
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
