Come out for the next season of America’s Greatest Makers

After a premiere season that saw Grush — an IoT-enabled gaming toothbrush aimed at getting kids to brush their teeth more effectively — take home the $1 million top prize, America’s Greatest Makers is coming back for another season of bringing IoT inventors together in a head-to-head battle for a sweet cash prize.

The primetime television show is produced by reality TV giant Mark Burnett, in partnership with Intel. Last season was especially exciting here at ReadWrite. Not only did we get to see emerging IoT technologies displayed on a national stage, but winning team was also an alumni of the IoT accelerator run by our parent company, Wearable IoT World.

This year, two IoT startup alumni are confirmed as auditioning  – SoundSight and Metron Force.

SoundSight produces an integrated video recording smart headphone that connects to your smartphone. Metron Force is a smart wristband for device radio control that uses intelligent wrist gestures.

“America’s Greatest Makers would be a good opportunity to explain how our technology differentiates us from the competition,” said Alex Hai, founder of Metron Force. “If we can tell our story to a national audience, our product will speak for itself.”

Makers to use new IoT technologies

Television series have a habit of upping the stakes. So for season two, in addition to Intel’s Curie Module that was used last year, Intel is making new technologies available to be integrated into the product.

The next-generation Intel Atom processor-based platform can provide contestants with advanced display, graphics and high-speed I/O in a low-power, small form-factor configuration for product ideas. And Intel’s RealSense ZR300 camera offers makers a small form-factor solution for contestants who want to add visual depth sensing and tracking capabilities to their product ideas.

“We’ve already been getting excited about what we can do with the Intel Atom,” says Stephen Chase, founder of SoundSight Smart-Headphones, about the audition process. “One of the things we’re most excited about with this competition that we would get to work closely with the brilliant people of Intel.”1 

The shows producers hope that the new technologies will elevate the competition. From Grush founder Ethan Schur’s experience, the lack of ability to code should not scare a potential applicant away. “If you find a problem big enough (to solve), you can prototype quickly,” he said. “There’s help out there. The maker community is there.”

Interested? You have until August 19th to apply here.

Smart toothbrush Grush wins America’s Greatest Makers

The team at Grush, and their smart toothbrush, has won TBS’ “America’s Greatest Makers” reality competition show, taking home the $1 million grand prize.

Grush makes brushing teeth – one of kids’ least favorite tasks and one of their parents’ most common pointed questions at bedtime – into a fun game. The toothbrush comes bundled with an interactive app, where your child brushes all of the dirt from a monster’s teeth.

The toothbrush sends motion to the mobile app in real-time, aiming to keep the brushing kid’s attention for a few minutes. Parents are able to look at the results and see if the child missed some teeth or did not brush enough.

“We’re very excited,” said Grush co-founder Ethan Schur about the big win. “Being on the show was a fantastic experience, it gave us a chance to take our concept into American homes.”

Grush solves a big challenge for many parents

And Grush is one of those rare connected devices that actually should have a home in every house in America, or at least every house with kids.

Grush’s founders – gaming expert Schur along with Dr. Yong-jing Wang and pediatric dentist Dr. Anubha Sacheti – discovered the problem: kids see brushing as an unpleasant chore because they can’t see what they are doing inside their mouths, and so have a lot of trouble to seeing how effective they are. In short, it’s all boring pain for no real gain.

But as some parents will love to point out – ok, mine sure did – the kids don’t pay the dental bills in the house. In fact, it was the resulting dental bills from co-founder Dr. Wang’s kids that spurred the idea for Grush.

Grush aims to transform that chore into a fun and interactive game. An advanced Bluetooth motion sensing toothbrush, coupled with interactive and instructive mobile games, guide kids’ brushing and lets parents track the results.

The connected toothbrush uses these fun and games to ensure a dentist’s idea of a perfect brushing every time – 30 seconds per mouth quadrant, with the proper brush angle toward the gum line – by counting and rewarding every brush stroke

The idea was a hit and the show certainly helped. Schur said that became apparent when they attended the Maker Faire and they discovered Grush was clearly getting the right kind of traction. “We found out a lot of our fans were under 12 years old,” he said.

“It’s no shocker they were crowned the winner,” said Kyle Ellicott, chief of labs at Wearable IoT World Labs, the accelerator that helped Grush get started. “It’s been amazing to witness – and be a part of – (their) storied journey over these past two years. They’ve accomplished some great feats and delivered an industry changing product.”

The startup plans to add a smart toothbrush for parents, focused on providing a more analytical service that warns when you don’t brush enough or miss spots. Grush is also planning to add multiple levels, which may contain microtransactions, to keep kids interested.

For people interested in the smart toothbrush, it is already available online for $59 and the mobile apps are available for free on iOS or the Google Play Store.

The maker community is also key

Schur said having great mentors on the show, including Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Massimo Banzi, co-founder/CEO of Arduino, maker of the popular development boards and a maker himself, helped with the business side of inventing. In the end, it’s not just about the prototype, he said.

Ultimately they had to convince judges who were essentially acting like investors normally would. “They asked very astute questions,” he said.

And setting a baseline of using show sponsor Intel’s Curie module meant that projects as diverse as those found on the show, from Grush’s toothbrush to “good vibes” wearable VENN, all had a common starting line.

“Every team may have had a different project,” Schur said. “But they all have the same resources and the same time.”

But he added that highlighting the inventor community – both the one created by the contestants and the one attracted to watching the series – was one of the greatest impacts of the show.

“(In) the maker community, we support each other,” he said. “We’re there helping each other, soldering, coding. That’s kind of the point.”

Second season in the works now

A second season of America’s Greatest Makers has been commissioned by TBS. So inventors of the world, get your applications in.

And Schur emphasizes you don’t need to be scared away by a perceived lack of ability to code or build things. You could use Intel’s Curie module with its existing code package right out of the box, for example – it’s easier than many people think.

Finding the right idea, and then putting together the right team, like Grush’s, is the path to success.

“If you find a problem big enough (to solve), you can prototype quickly,” he said. “There’s help out there. The maker community is there.”

Disclaimer: Grush was one of the alumni in our parent company’s accelerator, Wearable IoT World Labs.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t give them a hearty congratulations, too!

Bluetooth IoT devices tout new energy savings

The industry organization that develops Bluetooth standards introduced a new energy-efficient specification for Internet of Things (IoT) devices last week, with the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) unveiling a new specification for devices that contain Bluetooth and other radios at the Bluetooth World conference.

According to IOT Journal, the new specification – dubbed Transport Discovery Service (TDS) – will allow more energy-efficient communication between IoT devices. The new specification is applicable to Bluetooth devices with Bluetooth Core Specification version 4.0 or later.

The stakes are high to improve energy efficiency as IoT technology rapidly continues its expansion and integration with Bluetooth. By 2020, a third of all IoT devices are expected to include a Bluetooth radio, according to ABI research.

“The idea here is to make it easy for any wireless technology to be relevant” in relation to IoT technology, said Bluetooth SIG’s VP of marketing Errett Kroeter.

Kroeter says the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) specification for connecting devices to the Internet is sparking increasing interest among connected device makers. He said the TDS offers the added benefit of conserve increased amounts of battery life of wireless devices.

Bluetooth IoT energy-savings efforts have competition

However, for the TDS to become widely used, organizations like the ZigBee Alliance and the Wi-Fi Alliance must integrate TDS into their own protocols. Kroeter says that if there is collaboration with the Bluetooth SIG to develop and commercialize communications standards that make TDS functional, by early next year TDS could start appearing on the market.

Competing communications technologies are also working on the energy efficiency issue. The Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new type of Wi-Fi at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that’s meant to work on low-power devices, called Wi-Fi HaLow.

They intend to begin certifying HaLow products sometime in 2018, but may begin shipping shortly before then.

Besides the TDS specification, the Bluetooth SIG is developing a major update to the BLE Core Specification that will standardize the mesh networking protocol, double the data speed supported by BLE radios and quadruple radio range. The update, which won’t increase BLE devices’ power usage, is expected in the second half of 2016.