Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Legacy Archives

SunSprite tells you if you’re not getting enough sunlight

Add as a preferred source on Google

You might not realize it, but the amount of sunlight you’re exposed to every day has a huge impact on both your physical and mental well being. Take Seasonal Affective Disorder for example. It’s been scientifically proven that people tend to get depressed and feel lethargic if they go too long without adequate sun exposure. It’s also been proven that sunlight plays a crucial role in regulating your sleeping/waking cycle, so getting outside and soaking up some rays isn’t just a good idea, it’s crucial.

The only problem is that as the world becomes more and more digital, many of us spend more of our days indoors. For this reason, it’s difficult to tell if you’re getting enough sunlight each day, but if SunSprite –a new project on IndieGoGo– reaches its funding goal, this problem might be a thing of the past

Recommended Videos

Think of SunSprite like a Fitbit, but instead of giving you daily goals for the number of steps you take, it gives you a daily sunlight intake goal. Just clip it onto your clothing sunsprite appand go about your day — embedded light sensors will passively take readings on the amount of visible and UV light you’re exposed to, and let you know how close you are to attaining your daily goal via a low-power LED meter. If you want more detailed analytics on the quantity and quality of light you’re getting, just fire up the accompanying app. SunSprite syncs to your phone wirelessly via Bluetooth LE to give you real time info on how intense the light is, and can even give you alerts if you’re on the verge of getting a sunburn.

And best of all, you don’t need to charge this thing. Ever. SunSprite’s simple sensors get their power from a small, high-efficiency solar cell array on the device’s surface. According to creator Edward Likovich, just a few minutes of sunlight is enough to power the device for an entire week, so even if you leave your cave for an hour a day or less, it’ll still work.

SunSprite launched its IndieGoGo campaign toward the end of last month, but it’s already just a couple hundred dollars away from meeting its $50,000 funding goal. If you back the project now, you can lock one down for about $100 bucks — $50 less than what it’ll retail for later on down the road. Find out more here.

Drew Prindle
Former Senior Editor, Features
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
AI chatbots can often feed into your delusions. Researchers say you should look for three signs
Experts warn that chatbot design choices can reinforce unhealthy beliefs in vulnerable users.
ChatGPT on a smartphone

Artificial intelligence chatbots have become incredibly good at sounding human. But a new review paper by psychiatrist Marc Augustin and fellow researchers Thomas A. Pollak and Helen Morrin, published in NPP—Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, argues that existing AI research points to an overlooked psychological risk. The paper, highlighted by The Wall Street Journal, reviews previous studies and proposes a framework explaining how three common chatbot behaviors can combine to reinforce delusional thinking in vulnerable users, creating what the authors call an "amplification spiral."

Researchers say these are the three warning signs

Read more
Lost access to your crypto wallet? Don’t Google your way out of it
Security researchers warn that fake recovery tools are becoming the latest trap for crypto owners.
Bitcoin crypto wallet featured

Forgetting the recovery phrase to a crypto wallet can be stressful enough. Unfortunately, that's exactly the moment scammers are waiting for. A new warning highlights a growing scam in which cybercriminals disguise malware as cryptocurrency recovery software, tricking desperate users into handing over far more than just access to their wallets.

The fake recovery tool that's actually malware

Read more
Chinese AI lab says it can match Anthropic’s all-poweful Claude Mythos at sniffing security bugs
Security researchers say Z.ai's latest model can rival Anthropic's Mythos in one critical area.
China Z.Ai GLM-5.2 Featured Banner

For the past few weeks, Anthropic's Mythos has been viewed as the gold standard for AI-powered cybersecurity. That lead may already be shrinking. According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, security researchers say Chinese AI startup Z.ai's GLM-5.2 can now match Mythos when it comes to finding software security vulnerabilities, even if it still trails Anthropic and OpenAI in broader reasoning tasks.

GLM-5.2 is closing the gap in one very important area

Read more