There's no shortage of connected devices out there, yet somehow there's always room for more. Join us for a tour of 10 smart, slightly bizarre things that will make your life just a bit easier.

Eryn Leavens, Special Features & Copy Editor

February 24, 2015

10 Slides

You've undoubtedly heard about smart refrigerators and home temperature monitors, but how familiar are you with connected cattle and gardens? There's a whole weird world out there of connected devices, ready to take over your life.

Intel estimates that by the year 2020, there will be 26 connected things per person. That's an increase of 185 billion new smart devices in the next five years. So basically, your scale will be connected to your fridge, which will be connected to your exercise equipment. But it goes far beyond that. Everything that you can imagine being connected (and many things you would never think of) will be made into smart devices.

Click on the photo below to enter into the sometimes wonderful, sometimes bizarre, and often useful world of the newest breed of connected things.

Figure 1: The Cat Got Stuck in the Toilet Again... You've already got an (amusingly hackable) connected toilet, but what can you do to involve your pets? Get a connected litter box! Tailio ($179, pre-order) is a health-monitoring connected scale that sits under your litter box. The downside? It still requires manual cleaning. If you never want to clean the box again, check out CatGenie (starts at $229), a not quite connected yet highly self-cleaning system that connects to your cold water supply line.  
[Source: Henry Stern via Flickr]
You've already got an (amusingly hackable) connected toilet, but what can you do to involve your pets? Get a connected litter box! Tailio ($179, pre-order) is a health-monitoring connected scale that sits under your litter box. The downside? It still requires manual cleaning. If you never want to clean the box again, check out CatGenie (starts at $229), a not quite connected yet highly self-cleaning system that connects to your cold water supply line.
[Source: Henry Stern via Flickr]

For all the latest on the IoT, check out Light Reading's dedicated IoT content channel.

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About the Author(s)

Eryn Leavens

Special Features & Copy Editor

Eryn Leavens, who joined Light Reading in January 2015, attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before earning her BA in creative writing and studio arts from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. She also completed UC Berkeley Extension's Professional Sequence in Editing.

She stumbled into tech copy editing after red-penning her way through several Bay Area book publishers, including Chronicle Books, Counterpoint Press/Soft Skull Press and Seal Press. She spends her free time lifting heavy things, growing her own food, animal wrangling and throwing bowls on the pottery wheel. She lives in Alameda, Calif., with two cats and two greyhounds.

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