One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and I’m not sure if you can count four instances of a product as a trend, but it’s certainly an interesting thread at this year’s CES. At this year’s show, a quartet of companies are showing off urine analysis tools designed to be used at home by the general public. These are positioned as a natural evolution of the fitness tracker, a device you can use to keep an even closer eye on your health and fitness. Most of them are built for your toilet, testing your pee for any number of easy-to-identify maladies. But is this the next great frontier of consumer health tracking? That rather depends on the public’s desire to delve deep into their own bladders.

My cynical take: I suspect the reason we’re seeing these pop up is because the wearables world is now played out. Back in 2019, I wrote that we’d reached the point where there were no new features that could be fitted to a smartwatch, fitness tracker or ring. Or, at least, none that were as valid, effective or accurate as what you now expect every device on the market to offer. Once it was possible to put a single lead ECG in a watch, there were no new health-tracking worlds left to conquer that didn’t involve breaking the skin.

Dr. Audrey Bowden is Dorothy J. Wingfield Philips Chancellor Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, and head of the Bowden Biomedical Optics Laboratory. Dr. Bowden tells Engadget that clinical urinalysis is used as a “first line screening for many diseases and conditions such as diabetes and kidney disease,” but added that it can “also play a role in ordinary, routine checkups, such as during pregnancy.”

You may have seen your physician ask you for a urine sample and then stir a dipstick dotted with colored squares of reaction paper into the liquid you’ve just produced. In addition to visually checking urine for cloudiness (an obvious sign of a problem), these squares can run a wide variety of tests as part of this first-line screening process.

Each square corresponds to a different test, looking for factors like pH as well as the presence of blood, or white blood cells. Blood, for instance, can indicate kidney stones or cancer, while white blood cells are a clue your body is fighting an infection. If there’s excess glucose in the urine, it’s likely that diabetes is the culprit. Ketones would indicate ketosis, nitrites could indicate bacteria in the urinary tract, and so on.

Dr. Bowden added that for many conditions, urinalysis is not a “definitive diagnostic, but rather serves as an initial prompt to perform a more complete investigation.” And that since the clinical procedure has been to test for urine when there’s already evidence of a problem, it’s not clear how effective daily testing can really be.

A medical professional I interviewed, who requested anonymity for fear of compromising their professional standing, expressed skepticism both about the accuracy of these tests as well as their utility. They said that if people were running tests at home on a regular basis, it runs the risk of providing hypochondriacs with another reason to clog up care centers.

Dr. Shubha K. De (MD) is a Urologic surgeon who is presently working on a PhD in biomedical engineering. He raised a concern that, in primary care facilities, medical staff know how to validate the data they’re presented with, and to screen out false positives. This may not be the case in an at-home setting, and added that the accuracy of some tests vary wildly — a dipstick test to identify a bladder infection is roughly 80-percent accurate, but to diagnose bladder cancer, it falls to just 3 percent.

The most talked-about gadget at CES is surely Withings’ U-Scan, which even Jimmy Kimmel joked about in his opening monologue on Thursday. Given that Withings is already such a big name in the health-tracking world, it’s little surprise that it’s hogged the attention. The company showed off a device that sits on the dry part of your toilet bowl, and samples some of your trickle as you pee. Once that fluid is captured inside the device, it runs a sample through a microfluidic cartridge (with reaction paper) and uses a reader to look at the result. Once completed, the results are sent to your phone, with suggestions on what you might do to improve your health.

When it’s eventually released, U-Scan will offer a cartridge for menstrual cycle tracking, as well as one to monitor your hydration and nutrition levels. It’s this latter cartridge I tried during my time in Vegas this week, and it looked at the pH of my urine as well as the specific gravity (relative density) of my pee. But the company promises that it will eventually be able to identify nutrient levels, fat metabolism, ketones and quantities of vitamin C.

Both of these have raised red flags with professionals who are concerned that these analyses don’t suit a one-size-fits-all model. Dr. Bowden said that menstrual cycle tracking based on “‘normalization’ curves may have been developed with too narrow a demographic to capture all interested users.”

Dr. Bowden was also resistant to the idea that nutritional information can be extracted given clinical urinalysis doesn’t offer data about those markers. She said urine samples don’t really “provide reliable information over a given time window,” and added that a “daily analysis of food nutritional content may be a stretch.” Although she did say that it may be possible to detect “accumulated nutritional deficits.”

Dr. De, however, says that it may be possible to extrapolate nutritional information back to a person’s diet using urine analysis. They said that physicians currently ask patients to run 24-hour urine collections, and that fluid is then examined for specific substances — like uric acid — to make inferences on dietary intake. “This is not always perfect, and currently needs some correlation with one’s diet history,” but added that it’s plausible to imagine that, with a “user friendly app and some AI” that it could work well.

Withings is looking to develop more clinical tests, and has said that it’s already working on a way to screen for bladder cancer markers. It’s here that my source who asked not to be named feels would offer real value to groups who are at risk of the disease. They said that a targeted monitoring program may help identify instances of the cancer early, which should dramatically increase survival rates.

Daniel Cooper

Korean company Yellosis graduated from Samsung’s startup incubator some years ago, and already produces the Cym Boat personal urine testing kit. Cym Boat offers a small stick with reaction paper squares, which you then stand in a boat-shaped piece of card lined with color-calibration squares. Take a picture on your smartphone, and you’ll be able to look at the blood, protein, ketones, pH and glucose levels within your urine.

At the show, it also showed off its next-generation product, Cym Seat, which uses a metal arm to hold a paper stick under a person as they pee. Once completed, it slides the strip in front of an optical scanner, and after a minute, the results are pushed to your phone. But this device, which is expected to launch by the end of 2023 and cost around $1,000, automates the existing process rather than adding anything new.

Daniel Cooper

Similarly, Vivoo, which also offers a reaction-paper stick which can be analyzed by a smartphone app, is building its own toilet-mounted hardware, which pushes a pee stick into the toilet bowl and then pulls it back in once it’s collected a urine sample. An optical scanner then reads the reaction squares before depositing the stick in a collection bin for disposal later.

Daniel Cooper

Rounding out the group is Olive, which is taking a dramatically different tack. The device harnesses spectroscopy rather than reaction paper, with hardware that sits under your toilet seat, and a bank of LEDs flashing toward rear-mounted photodiodes. The potential for such a technology is far greater than reaction paper, and there are some studies that have pointed to being able to identify infection with it.

Olive is presently being used in a handful of locations in the Netherlands, including an assisted living facility. Co-founder Corey Katz told Engadget that one of the most surprising uses for the technology was for personnel to keep accurate records of patient bathroom visits. Katz added that work is presently under way to find a way to measure levels of protein in urine to identify instances of preeclampsia.

The company says that there’s a broad number of conditions that spectroscopy could be used to test for. This includes hydration and ketosis all the way through to stress, creatinine levels and electrolyte balances. The hope is that a finished version of the hardware will be ready to go by the end of 2023, although it’ll only be sold to business customers.

There are issues, including around data security, especially for menstrual cycle tracking in countries like the US. Companies that could expose fertility data will need to be mindful of the legal context that is presently in place post-Roe.

If Dr. De has a final concern, it’s a worry that these at-home devices will encourage patients to take medical matters into their own hands without the supervision of a physician. “If [urine analysis systems] direct you to take supplements which jeopardize pre-existing medical conditions,” for instance, “then it could be quite dangerous.”

Of course, there are other things that independent experts (and journalists) will need to test when these devices make it out into the real world. Dr. Bowden raised concerns that urinalysis tests can be “impacted by a number of external factors,” which clinical settings make an effort to control for. Will these devices be accurate enough for the jobs they’ve been bought to do? And will the conclusions they provide be worthwhile? There’s a lot to work through before these products become ubiquitous in bathrooms around the world.

There are certain things you can’t really demonstrate in the same way as other pieces of consumer electronics. A WiFi-connected urine analyzer that sits in your toilet and samples your pee for analysis is one such gadget. That’s why I had to go to a behind-closed-doors event in a private suite here at CES in Las Vegas to test out this prototype version of Withings’ U-Scan.

U-Scan is Withings first attempt at a body fluid-analysis device, albeit one with the weight of such a well-regarded brand in the health tech space. The shell-shaped hardware sits on the edge of your bowl like a scent block, and catches a small sample of fluid while you’re micturating. After around a minute, users will find conclusions about their menstrual cycle or nutrition, depending on what cartridge is installed, pushed to their phone.

Regardless of biology, you’ll need to sit down on the toilet to use this thing, and that it’s a little surprising when the hardware lights up when it starts working. You’ll certainly know when it is as well, since it makes a fairly noticeable whirring noise while your sample is processed. At this early stage, I was able to receive information about two stats: The pH of my urine as well as its specific gravity.

Now, I could reveal what my stats were, but I’d much rather not spoil the video where you can learn a little bit more about how it all works.

I get it: On one hand, you want to be a resilient off-grid solarpunk freed from the yoke of your increasingly-unreliable power company. On the other, you’d still like to enjoy creature comforts both at home and when you’re on the road. It’s a problem EcoFlow understands, and has turned up to CES promising to help.

The company is showing off a new Whole Home Backup Solution, which ties in to its existing Delta Pro batteries. But that’s less interesting to me than the gizmos which are joining the ecosystem at today’s show. That includes Blade, a robotic lawnmower looking more like an RC car than its garden-shaving brethren, but the company says it’ll both trim your lawn and pick up fallen leaves, making “lawn care totally hassle-free.”

Then there’s Glacier, a portable fridge which comes with its own built-in battery and, crucially, its own ice maker. That way, you can keep the cocktails coming when the power is out, as well as keep vital medicines and other necessaries cold when the power’s gone. Rounding out the set is a new, updated version of its Wave, battery powered portable air conditioner, which can now do heating as well as cooling.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a timeline for when we can play with these products, or how much we can expect to pay for them when they arrive. But it does look as if there’s going to be a lot more people looking to add some energy independence to their homes in the future. And, I’m sure, plenty of them won’t want to abandon their creature comforts.

Non-parents may not believe it, but pushing a pram around can be a fairly strenuous task, especially when the train gets rough. It’s a full body workout to push two kids under four in my old Uppababy Vista, which weighed the same as an iceberg and had the turning circle of the Titanic. To remedy this, Canadian startup GlüxKind has developed an electrically-assisted stroller that’ll make pushing easier, and can even drive itself, albeit only when your kid isn’t on board.

The GlüxKind Ella is the brainchild of Anne Hunger and Kevin Huang, a couple who were less than whelmed when looking for a stroller for their own daughter. They decided to build their own device by strapping an electric skateboard to a regular stroller, and started developing their product from there. The device has three modes, the first of which is to add electric assist to the wheels as you’re pushing it around.

Trying this in an admittedly limited demo at CES, it feels very much like the sort of power boost you get with an e-bike. You still have to push this thing around, but you only have to make a fairly meager level of effort before the motor kicks in and helps you out. As well as easier forward motion, you’ll also find turning to be a lot snappier than you may expect, useful too when you’re trying to maneuver your rugrat in tight spaces. It’ll also prove useful when going uphill, or if you’re carrying lots of groceries in Ella’s surprisingly large cargo space.

I’m told that the battery will last for around eight hours of mixed use, and you’ll need to charge it at the end of every day, more or les.

You can also set the pram to rock your baby to sleep, moving backwards and forwards by about a foot. This, I’m sure, will be a godsend to parents who are otherwise praying for divine intervention at 3am as their precious child refuses to sleep. I’m aware that there are some safety caveats about using such a feature on a regular basis, but being able to call on the feature in a pinch will surely be an instant-sell to some harangued parents.

The last mode, and the most eye-catching, is self-driving, where the stroller will drive ahead of you by a couple of feet. It’ll maintain power when going up hill, and brake so it stays close to you when you’re going down the other side. But crucially, the system is designed to not work if you put your kid in the seat and expect the pram to do all of the work. A weight sensor in the bassinet and stroller chair will block the function if it detects the presence of a child.

A product like this is, understandably, going to be at the higher end of the price scale, and when it hits Kickstarter this spring, the first 100 units will set you back $3,800. Once that early bird special is done with, the price is likely to climb a little higher, but for that you’ll also get built-in GPS so you can track where your pram is if you’ve asked friends and family to babysit. GlüxKind also has plans to build out a community feature to find and connect like-minded parents — the sort of whom are also prepared to spend north of four grand on a self-driving stroller.

At the back end of 2020, Ring showed off a concept device it promised would be coming to homes at some point in the future. The Always Home Cam is a mini drone, designed to zoom around your home, patrolling for intruders when you weren’t in. Now, at CES 2023, the company offered us a first real-world look at the hardware in flight, although it’s still reluctant to commit to a release date, or a price.

The whole package looks more like a kitchen countertop gadget, a smart bread bin or similar, rather than a security drone. It’s a little larger than it looks in Ring’s initial demo videos, although not by very much, and while it doesn’t look like any other drone on the market, it certainly sounds like one. If you’ve ever annoyed a pet with a toy mini drone, then you can expect a similarly disgruntled animal whenever this thing is on patrol.

Daniel Cooper

Ring’s team did explain how this would work when it eventually made its debut, like the fact it’ll cover one floor — ideally the ground floor — in your home. You’ll train it by holding it (without obscuring the camera) and walking around your home in a series of flightpaths. You’re able to set multiple paths, and individual waypoints, so if you want to check the back door, or if you’ve left the stove on, you can without having to wait too long.

Should you spot something amiss, you can also set the camera to pause in mid-air and rotate around to surveil the local area. And there won’t be another app dedicated to controlling the drone, it’ll all be folded in to Ring’s existing app, at least when we finally see it in the real world. Sadly, Ring isn’t yet ready to share its thoughts on that matter, but the fact it’s ready to show off prototypes means it has to be closer to sale than not. 

Back in 2020, Ring announced a security camera for your car that connects to the company’s wider home security ecosystem. Now, slightly after its planned 2021 release date, Ring is opening pre-orders for Car Cam, the newest member of its security family. The unit is pretty small, but projects up and away on a cantilever arm mounted to your dashboard to give it the necessary height.

There are two cameras, one to keep an eye on the interior, the other facing out the front window to capture any insurance-worthy incidents. Should the system’s sensors be startled, it’ll trigger a recording, and alert you via the Ring app to show you what’s going on. Like pretty much every other Ring device, there’s a microphone and speaker, allowing you to watch (and communicate) with any unwanted visitors lurking in your vehicle.

In addition, Car Cam will automatically begin recording if you say “Alexa, record,” and has been designed to capture footage from traffic stops. (Which, when you think about it, speaks volumes about how little even a company with very close ties to law enforcement thinks about the integrity of what goes on at traffic stops.) The hardware is powered from the car’s battery, connected via the OBD-II port, and will use WiFi to communicate unless you opt for LTE by paying for a Ring Protect Go subscription.

Ring has added that, like its other products, you’ll have the option to activate end-to-end encryption, and won’t activate a recording unless triggered. It added that a privacy shutter will enable you to block the internal camera and microphone when closed. It’ll be available to pre-order from today, with shipping expected to begin in February, but there’s a hefty incentive to get your cash on the barrelhead now and not wait for the retail launch. Car Cam will retail for $250, but early pre-order customers can get theirs for $200 —while the Protect Go subscription will set you back $60 a year, or $6 a month.

Dutch solar car startup Lightyear started shipping its first vehicle — dubbed the Lightyear 0 — earlier this year. But while few people have driven this unique take on EV power, the company is already talking up its plans for the successor. At CES, Lightyear has announced that it is opening the waitlist for its second model — Lightyear 2 — which promises an even more radical take on a car powered by sunshine.

For the uninitiated, Lightyear makes an EV which was draped in panels, designed to get some of its charge from the sun as it travels. Its spacious-yet-aerodynamic liftback frame has a panel on the bonnet, as well as much of the rear roofline. The 782 solar cells on the body are, Lightyear claims, capable of adding more than 43 miles of extra range on a sunny day. But such cutting-edge tech does not come cheaply, with Lightyear asking for nearly $300,000 for the existing model.

The company says, however, that the newer model will be priced for less than $40,000, and is designed to offer an affordable way in for would-be EV buyers. Its super-efficient shape gives it a drag coefficient of around 0.175, slicing through the air far easier than most EVs on the market. That means Lightyear can reduce the size of the heavy (and expensive) battery to help make things more affordable. Although, naturally, it’ll work better in countries blessed with wall-to-wall sunshine for the longest period of time in the year.

Lightyear 2 is expected to start production in 2025, giving you plenty of time to look for somewhere warmer and sunnier to move to. 

Anyone who knows their tools knows that Makita, which makes drills and saws, also produces its own coffee machine that runs on the same batteries that power its equipment. Not to be outdone, Black + Decker has its own powered cocktail maker, and has now built a cordless model that you can take on the road. The Bev by Black + Decker Cordless Cocktail Maker is a battery powered booze-dispenser that harnesses Bartesian’s capsules to dish out alcoholic goodies.

Standing taller than a foot on the tabletop, the portable Bev has space for six liquor bottles with the Bartesian pod up front. Naturally, you can use the controls on the top of the machine to set your dose size, from mocktail all the way through to large. And, because a cocktail dispenser isn’t the conversation starter it once was, the unit has its own “enhanced party mode” with a “rainbow of colors that light under the bottles.”

The company says that you’ll be able to get up to 250 drinks on a single charge, assuming you’re rocking a fully-charged 20V MAX battery and don’t want anything too fancy. Naturally, when it’s plugged in, the machine will charge the battery, and run it down when you’re out of the kitchen. In terms of availability, the Bev by Black + Decker Cordless will be available in Spring of 2023, with the price set at $400 when it arrives.

There are plenty of reasons why we’re not yet in a mass-production revolution enabled by 3D printing. One of them is the technology is time-consuming and often forces you to leave a print running overnight without supervision. It means there’s likely plenty of dead time, when a finished print is sat in the hopper, and there’s nobody around to pull it out and get the next one going. It’s a problem that Formlabs is hoping to address with its “Automation Ecosystem,” a family of products you can bolt on to some of its printers to help automate the fiddly bits.

This includes Form Auto, which can remove a printed part from a machine, freeing it up to start on the next one. You can also add a High Volume Resin system which will increase the printers’ raw material capacity up to five liters. And there’s Fleet Control — new software that’ll help manage a fleet of printers, letting you balance the workload across all of your units. The systems are all, naturally, designed for small and medium enterprises who rely upon manufacturing but can’t spare the warm bodies to worry at each printer in turn. (It'll also come in handy for companies like Hasbro, which is 3D printing people's heads for its custom action figure line.) 

Formlabs says that the benefits — beyond being able to leave work running unsupervised for longer — include less material wastage and cheaper prints. The company says it expects to see users’ per-print costs fall by anything up to 40 percent, as well as reducing packaging waste. As for pricing, Form Auto will set you back $3,400 (with a year's free Fleet Control thrown in), with shipping expected to begin in the second half of the year. 

One of the more unfortunate consequences of our energy companies failing to invest in smarter and greener technology when it had the chance, is that now we have to do it all ourselves. And it’s certainly not the most fun in the world trying to tie together a grid inside your own home with so many competing companies in the space. Schneider Electric is pledging to offer a one-company-fixes-all solution with its Home Energy Management System, which it’s announcing at CES.

Schneider’s system is, more or less, all of the components necessary to manage your home’s energy needs. That includes a home battery, solar inverter, electrical panel, connected power outlets, smart switches and its own EV charger. The idea being that you can buy all of the bits at once and then manage all of your home’s power needs from a single app. That should, says the company, help reduce the cost, complexity and space requirements of buying these components separately.

If there’s a benefit to such a system, it’s that Schneider’s hardware will co-ordinate the sources of energy in your home to suit your needs. That’s especially important during a power outage, where for instance, you can set the system to only power the essentials to preserve energy. So, you can set it to run your fridge, freezer, water heater and HVAC, but nothing else when things get rough. You’ll also be able to set it to calculate when energy costs are at their lowest, for instance, in order to charge an EV from grid power.

There’s no word on price yet, but we can expect the components to make themselves available across the year.