Our picks of the latest travel gadgets
iHealth Monitor
It’s a day for personal resolutions or perhaps, personal revolutions. Gym memberships, bikes and promises to do more exercise abound. Largely to be discarded within weeks if not days, of course, but surely that’s the fun of them.
iHealth’s idea is a personal blood pressure monitoring system – though the sight of that increasingly tiresome lower case “i” can be enough to drive some blood pressures skywards.
With its own arm cuff wired to a dock into which you slot your Apple device of choice, you can keep track of your diastolic and systolic blood pressure (the max and min, based on your heart’s pump action) and heart rate. Thanks to iHealth’s free app, the data can be stored and graphed to help check your new health regime, or shared with your GP perhaps. Or ignored. And it can be combined with an iHealth Scale that wirelessly adds this unspeakable, post-festive reality into the mix too.
$100 from ihealth99.com; App free from the App Store
Airborne Volcanic Object Imaging Detector (Avoid)
This is not exactly the sort of gadget you might have on your 2012 wish list, but we’ll all be grateful if the world’s airlines get one. And soon, to skip the sort of apocalyptic travel disruption that Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökul eruption caused last year.
Now a Norwegian engineer may have ash-proofed us even a little with his AVOID technology. The real problem before was no one was sure exactly where the dense, dangerous ash plumes really were, so there was a mass grounding. AVOID uses two infrared cameras tuned to see volcanic silicates up to 100km in front of the airplane and so let pilots manoeuvre around areas of trouble. Testing is ongoing and, if all goes well and certification is approved by the European Aviation Safety Agency, airlines will start installing AVOID devices on planes from next summer.
Zapata Flyboard
With a moniker like a character in some Elmore Leonard novel, this is a brand new way to give yourself a really fabulous injury – and have great fun doing it.
The Zapata part is from Franky Zapata, a world-class French jet ski rider. He’s invented the Flyboard, which essentially harnesses some of the output from a jet ski and directs it to a pair of boot-mounted nozzles. You can do the math on what happens now: you blast through the air on high-powered columns of water, steering yourself with what for all the world looks like a pair of watery crutches. Those may come later.
In Zapata’s skilful hands, the Flyboard endows him with superhero-like skills, zooming across and over water. It remains to be seen how the rest of us manage.
Around €5,000, zapata-racing.com