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Get Your Segway on the Installment Plan

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Get Your Segway on the Installment Plan
Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you’ve dreamed about zipping around town

Geoff Duncan
Geoff Duncan
Former Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
Proxima wants to move blood tests into the home, and it has cleared an important early hurdle
The portable analyzer delivers blood-count results in about 20 minutes, but its promise depends on transparent clinical data
Furniture, Table, Desk

Algocyte’s Proxima is designed to run blood-count tests from a small finger-prick sample and send the results to a clinician in about 20 minutes. For patients who need frequent monitoring, that could mean fewer trips to a clinic or laboratory.

The device has also moved beyond the concept stage. Proxima carries UK conformity credentials, while Algocyte operates under a certified medical-device quality system. Those steps give the project more weight than a prototype shown at a launch event.

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Remember Samsung’s Ballie home robot? It may finally be inching closer to reality
Leaked app wireframes give the strongest hint yet that Samsung's Ballie home robot, first shown at CES 2020, might still be headed toward an actual release.
Samsung Ballie robot in a room next to a dog feeder.

Samsung's rolling home robot has been the industry's longest-running "will it ever actually ship" joke, and I'll admit I'd mostly given up on it. Now, there's finally a glimmer of hope.

Samsung first unveiled Ballie as a concept at CES 2020. Then, it showed it as a significantly upgraded version four years later. However, the company never confirmed a release date or committed to releasing it at all. 

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The US foreign-made robot crackdown is coming for future Roombas too
Future Roombas face new US sales hurdles, but existing models are unaffected
Roomba 980

The FCC has already made it much harder for foreign drone makers such as DJI to bring new products into the US. Now, the same crackdown is reaching a machine far more likely to be moving around your living room.

The US government recently added foreign-made advanced robotic devices to the FCC’s Covered List. The announcement appeared focused on humanoids, robot dogs, and industrial machines, but an FCC spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that robot vacuum cleaners are covered too.

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