Kickstart This! Monitor your vital signs... and your dreams

Daniel Fisher scours the internet's many crowd-funding sites for the best (and weirdest) projects looking for finance. This week: an alarm clock that records your dreams, and the future of health technology.

 Angel: the first open sensor for health and fitness
Angel: the first open sensor for health and fitness

Angel is a wristband that monitors your vital signs and sends them to your phone via Bluetooth – and what you can do with the data is potentially limitless.

Fundamentally, Angel monitors pulse, temperature, physical activity and blood oxygen levels. Where it gets interesting is, rather than create a single app or piece of software to work with the wristband, the company is making the API open source, which means any developers can create their own apps to work with the device, using the data in different ways.

This means the potential use of the wristband is extensive – whether it's perfecting your golf swing, an app that warns you when your child has a fever, workout trackers, sleep monitors, or fertility calendars, the list is practically endless.

The device hasn't been through clinical trials and as yet “makes no medical claims”. So that's quite a big asterix next to the Angel. But if this small yellow wristband is proven to do what it says, expect to hear more about it in the not-so-far future.

What they say

In the future, we imagine devices like Angel doing amazing things. It is exciting even to try and guess where this technology could take us in just a few years, but to get there faster, we need health innovation on a massive scale. Angel was built to enable just that.

The money

Co-founder Eugene Jorov and the team behind Angel, based in Israel, need to raise $100,000 by November 1 to take their health monitor through the final development stages and into production. Pledge more than $135 and, if the project reaches its goal, you'll receive an Angel health sensor when they begin shipping in April next year.

Coming to a shop near you - SHADOW | Community of Dreamers

Entrepreneur Hunter Lee Soik is fascinated by dreams. Sleep, he writes, is where some of humanity's greatest creations were conceived – from electricity to nonviolent resistance to Frankenstein’s monster. And yet, around 95% of dreams are forgotten within five minutes of waking. What would happen if we remembered? With his successful Kickstarter SHADOW, that's what he is aiming to find out.

SHADOW is basically a fancy alarm clock smartphone app. You tell it what time you want to wake up, and it then wakes you with a series of escalating alarms. The gradual increase in volume apparently “helps you better remember your dreams by taking you through your hypnopompic state.” Once you're awake the alarm clock then prompts you to record your dreams (either by texting or talking straight into the app).

Over time, SHADOW will create visualisations of your sleep and dream patterns and identify themes. This can be kept personal, or shared with the world. The aim is to create the “largest database of human dream knowledge in the world.”

It's a fun idea. Soik reckons his app will “forever change the course of human history”. Call me a cynic but I somehow doubt that. However as someone who never remembers his dreams for more than a few seconds, I'll be extremely tempted to download the app when it's released next year.

SHADOW smashed its $50,000 goal with still more than 30 days to go.

Punt of the week – Cork It

Another good example this week of crowd-funding being used to solve problems that don't exist. What to do with all your wine corks? Whatever the answer is, it isn't Cork It: “an innovative new home decor brand lets you make art from old wine corks.”

A nice idea, perhaps, were it not for the fact that sticking wine corks into a metal grid does not make a nice piece of art. Shame really. You can see the chap thinks he's stumbled upon a really good idea. You can just imagine Duncan Bannatyne and the dragons giving him one of those awful “it's rubbish, you're wasting your life” dressing downs.

Perhaps I'm being harsh. Have a look for yourself and if you fancy it you can help Cork It reach its $20,000 goal here.