CES is a convention about tons of consumer electronics from all different categories and one of those categories is wearables. While most of the wearables that people will likely be familiar with are smartwatches or fitness trackers, or even smart glasses, each year more and more types of wearables seem to emerge that are aiming to offer all sorts of different benefits. This year CES was home to a vast array of different products and one of those was called the UV Sense from L’Oréal, which might seem strange as it’s not really a company that is known for releasing electronics. Rather, it’s a French cosmetics company that specializes in various types of cosmetics, such as skin care.
Considering this, it might be less of a surprise to learn that L’Oréal came to CES with a wearable called UV Sense, which is a skin care wearable designed for the purpose of measuring a single person’s UV exposure. There are multiple reasons why this is a wearable product worth the Best of CES label. Partly because the UV Sense is a unique offering that L’Oréal wants to deliver without the user having to wear something bulky. Partly because it’s an improvement on what L’Oréal calls the My UV Patch, which essentially does the same thing as the UV Sense but for a much shorter period of time. Therein lies one of the major benefits of the UV Sense. It’ designed to last for up to a several weeks as opposed to a several days.
According to L’Oréal the UV Sense is meant to be worn on the thumbnail because it gets optimal sunlight so this is a prime location for wearing it for the task of measuring exposure to the sun’s UV rays. It’s a battery-free wearable too, so there’s no having to replace batteries or plug it in to charge it. You just stick it to the thumbnail and it’ll perform its tasks for up to two weeks. Once those two weeks are up the UV Sense can still continue working but it will need to be reapplied, something which L’Oréal thought about as you simply have to use some of the included adhesives that come with the device to stick it back on the thumbnail and wear it for another two weeks if desired, or longer by applying even more adhesives after this time. The UV Sense can hold up to three months of data altogether so technically this is how long one user can wear the UV Sense.
The point of this wearable is to measure UV exposure, but even that has a deeper purpose as L’Oréal wants to help consumers change their habits in regards to exposing themselves to the sun. The goal is to make sure that users are putting on more sunscreen or staying in the shade for longer periods of time so that sun exposure isn’t as frequent, which in turn should help the skin. According to L’Oréal the My UV Patch wasn’t giving them enough real-time data, so UV Sense was born to help achieve this as it can monitor UV exposure for a longer time frame and perhaps give some better insight. Without a battery you might wonder how the UV Sense is able to perform what it was designed to do, and the answer is that it’s powered by your smartphone. It connects to it through a downloadable mobile app which is available for both Android and iOS, and using NFC it transfers any data that’s captured about the UV exposure to the app so that users can see the data for themselves and adjust their exposure to the sun accordingly. All things considered the UV Sense is a pretty impressive little piece of technology. It may have a simple task to perform, but it does so without a battery which allows it to stay small and mostly out of sight since it’s worn on the thumbnail. It’s not your typical piece of technology but it’s one that doesn’t really need a screen for its direct use like so many of the other wearables people are used to seeing, and that’s a good thing.
