This Incredible Watch

July 10, 2014

A striking number of people have asked me about this watch I've been wearing for the past few months.

The Eone Timepiece (source: Eone)

The Eone Timepiece has two ball bearings in two circular tracks so that you can use your sense of touch to know the hour and minute of the day. Underneath the watch face, magnets cause the ball bearings to move, much like analog watch hands, to the correct hour and minute positions.

It's a watch "designed for everyone": It was created in close consultation with people who are blind, but it is meant for anyone who has ever wanted to know the time when it isn't possible to look down at your watch or phone. I'll be the first to admit that I've used it to check the time during meetings. :) More accurately, it's not a watch, because you don't need vision to tell the time; it's a "tactile timepiece."

Eone's founder and CEO, Hyungsoo Kim, came up with the idea as an MIT Sloan MBA student. He worked with members of the Visually Impaired and Blind User Group (VIBUG), which meets on campus monthly to discuss assistive technologies for people with vision impairments. Here's a great video showing some user interviews with early prototypes of the device:

I really like the design; I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who likes cool watches. What I enjoy even more, though, are the conversations it helps spark about assistive technology. In addition to an assistive device's function, many people who have a disability also care about aesthetics, just like the rest of the world (this is something that Open Style Lab is also trying to address in the realm of fashion and clothing). Moreover, by marketing to both sighted and blind people, manufacturing economies of scale start to apply. This strategy is one way to tackle the challenges of assistive technology economics -- assistive devices are often exorbitantly expensive because markets are small and needs are specialized or, even worse, simply do not exist at all (I've written about this in the past). Expanding the market beyond the specific population of people with a disability likely isn't the solution to every problem, but I believe there are more ideas that could adopt this business model.

Eone set a $40,000 goal on Kickstarter. It ended up raising nearly $600,000; the video from their wildly successful campaign is below, and the Eone Timepiece is now available for sale (if you wanted to, you could order one right now). Their website is worth checking out. I'm looking forward to what Hyungsoo and the Eone team come out with next.

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Tags: assistive technology