A New Product Called Mother

No, it isn't a joke. It's a new high-tech device unveiled by a firm called Sen.se at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, and it is designed to "replicate the sorts of things your mother used to needle you about: getting exercise, eating more slowly and brushing your teeth," reports WSJ's Geoffrey Fowler.

Mother’s potential use is intriguing: Each Mother unit talks wirelessly to a set of smaller tracking devices, dubbed cookies, that can sense motion and temperature. You can put cookies on things and people – on your body to gather data about how much you walk, on your coffee machine to track many espressos you drink, on your front door to track whenever it is opened, on your toothbrush to see how often and how long you brush … and so forth.

Whenever the cookies get close to the Mother unit, they wirelessly send back their data to the Internet.

The company says users of Mother, which is supposed to start shipping in the spring, will be able look at all their info at once, or drill down on certain topics. And if something is really important, you can have an alert sent to your phone when a sensor detects a change.

So what does all that data do for you? That’s a question that bedevils many Internet of Things gadgets on display here at CES. Mother’s makers say the data she tracks can help you gain peace of mind by answering specific questions in your life, such as, “Am I drinking enough water?” or, “Did somebody open my secret drawer?”