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Getting a small child to brush their teeth can feel like hosting a nightly WWE wrestling match in your bathroom. But the new icon-based Octopus watch for kids ages 3 to 8 aims to help with this and other daily habits. 

The Octopus watch's Kickstarter campaign has raised more than $231,000 in pledges — more than four times its $50,000 fundraising goal — which could indicate that at least a few parents are seeking help in the instilling-good-habits department. 

Actually the Octopus, designed by JOY, has three intended functions. It's a watch, teaching kids to read time using both digital and analog faces. It's a scheduler that parents can remote-program with pop-up icons to notify kids when it's time for certain activities: basketball practice, bath time, feeding the cat. And it's an assistant, providing tips, notes, and reminders for both kids and parents.

"Studies have shown that children under 8 years old don’t understand the concept of time, let alone remember what to do when a certain time rolls around," the company says on its Kickstarter page. "We have designed the first watch that helps them understand how parents expect them to use their time. We believe this will help children form good habits and help them to take responsibility for their actions."

"We have designed the first watch that helps [kids] understand how parents expect them to use their time."

The Octopus is controlled by an iOS or Android app. It comes with customizable, age-based schedule templates and an optional gamification feature that lets kid unlock badges. Parents can sync up via Bluetooth, program the watch in three different modes, according to a child's developmental stage (from icon-based to text-based), and there are 600 stored icons. 

(Fingers crossed that one of those 600 stands for, "Seriously, no, you can't have a lollipop. You can eat almost anything else. Please stop asking.")

Also, two separate phones can sync up with the same watch — or multiple watches — meaning the Octopus system is flexible enough to allow two parents or caregivers to collaborate in programming watches for multiple children, if needed. 

The watch itself is available in four kid-friendly colors, and it features a color OLED display. It comes with a USB charging cable and wall plug, and JOY claims battery life is around 96 hours on a full, three-hour recharge. An optional, ghostie-looking cyclops charging stand (maybe it's supposed to look like... an octopus?) is available for purchase, and doubles as a nightlight. 

The Octopus watch is also IP65 water resistant, meaning it can't go to swim class but it should survive sprinklers and hand-washing. 

Xiaomi recently released its own version of a smartwatch for kids, 8-bit the Mi Bunny, but it's mostly useful for tracking your kid's location, whereas the Octopus is focused on building a sense of autonomous participation in family routines. In its Kickstarter campaign, the company points out that the watch is useful for minimizing run-of-the-mill daily power struggles and has also been well received by parents of kids with special needs who benefit from extra structure and reminders. 

Modern parents know that it can be tough to resist quantifying kids' lives, and to strike a balance between teaching them to be productive and allowing time for unstructured play. But the Octopus seems like a potentially fun family experiment that could introduce kids to some of the more helpful aspects of technology without sticking them in front of a screen. 

The Octopus was developed and prototyped by JOY's co-founders, Sam Hickman and Omar Alaouf, during a three-month stint with a team at the HAX hardware accelerator program in Shenzen, China. Their Kickstarter campaign launched in June 2016, and the company plans to ship its first watches in Nov. 2016.

Until then, we'll continue to rely on bubble-gum flavored toothpaste and a modified sleeper hold to persuade our kids to brush. 

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Getting a small child to brush their teeth can feel like hosting a nightly WWE wrestling match in your bathroom. But the new icon-based Octopus watch for kids ages 3 to 8 aims to help with this and other daily habits. 

The Octopus watch's Kickstarter campaign has raised more than $231,000 in pledges — more than four times its $50,000 fundraising goal — which could indicate that at least a few parents are seeking help in the instilling-good-habits department. 

Actually the Octopus, designed by JOY, has three intended functions. It's a watch, teaching kids to read time using both digital and analog faces. It's a scheduler that parents can remote-program with pop-up icons to notify kids when it's time for certain activities: basketball practice, bath time, feeding the cat. And it's an assistant, providing tips, notes, and reminders for both kids and parents.

"Studies have shown that children under 8 years old don’t understand the concept of time, let alone remember what to do when a certain time rolls around," the company says on its Kickstarter page. "We have designed the first watch that helps them understand how parents expect them to use their time. We believe this will help children form good habits and help them to take responsibility for their actions."

"We have designed the first watch that helps [kids] understand how parents expect them to use their time."

The Octopus is controlled by an iOS or Android app. It comes with customizable, age-based schedule templates and an optional gamification feature that lets kid unlock badges. Parents can sync up via Bluetooth, program the watch in three different modes, according to a child's developmental stage (from icon-based to text-based), and there are 600 stored icons. 

(Fingers crossed that one of those 600 stands for, "Seriously, no, you can't have a lollipop. You can eat almost anything else. Please stop asking.")

Also, two separate phones can sync up with the same watch — or multiple watches — meaning the Octopus system is flexible enough to allow two parents or caregivers to collaborate in programming watches for multiple children, if needed. 

The watch itself is available in four kid-friendly colors, and it features a color OLED display. It comes with a USB charging cable and wall plug, and JOY claims battery life is around 96 hours on a full, three-hour recharge. An optional, ghostie-looking cyclops charging stand (maybe it's supposed to look like... an octopus?) is available for purchase, and doubles as a nightlight. 

The Octopus watch is also IP65 water resistant, meaning it can't go to swim class but it should survive sprinklers and hand-washing. 

Xiaomi recently released its own version of a smartwatch for kids, 8-bit the Mi Bunny, but it's mostly useful for tracking your kid's location, whereas the Octopus is focused on building a sense of autonomous participation in family routines. In its Kickstarter campaign, the company points out that the watch is useful for minimizing run-of-the-mill daily power struggles and has also been well received by parents of kids with special needs who benefit from extra structure and reminders. 

Modern parents know that it can be tough to resist quantifying kids' lives, and to strike a balance between teaching them to be productive and allowing time for unstructured play. But the Octopus seems like a potentially fun family experiment that could introduce kids to some of the more helpful aspects of technology without sticking them in front of a screen. 

The Octopus was developed and prototyped by JOY's co-founders, Sam Hickman and Omar Alaouf, during a three-month stint with a team at the HAX hardware accelerator program in Shenzen, China. Their Kickstarter campaign launched in June 2016, and the company plans to ship its first watches in Nov. 2016.

Until then, we'll continue to rely on bubble-gum flavored toothpaste and a modified sleeper hold to persuade our kids to brush. 

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

The solution to tiny touchscreens is, apparently, your skin.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Future Interface group unveiled SkinTrack, the first skin-based wearable interface that overcomes tiny smartwatch screens by turning your forearm and the back of your hand into touch and gesture interfaces.

SkinTrack consists of a signal-emitting ring that you wear on your index finger and a sensing smartwatch band.

The band has four electrodes to measure the X and Y position of the ring. Not only does it measure position, the system computes the distance from the finger to each electrode (called the Phase) and uses that information to continuously tracks the finger's motion in real time.

Together, the sensors can read discrete gestures and know, with up to 99% accuracy, where on the skin you're touching.

To demonstrate, the Carnegie Mellon researchers built their own custom smartwatch prototype and showed how the tiny smart watch interface can virtually expand from almost the crook of the arm to the base of the fingers.

They built applications for navigating through smartwatch apps, pinning some to the virtual interface space on the skin, making phone calls, playing music, and even adding special gestures to launch functions on the smartwatch like writing an "A" on the skin to access the watch's contact list.

One of the core benefits of SkinTrack is that a user can interact with watch apps without their finger blocking the tiny wearable screen. Just think what Apple could do if it built this into the next Apple Watch. Surely then the Apple Watch App ecosystem would explode. No more trying to squeeze an iPhone's-worth of on-screen interactivity into a 1-inch display.

The core limitation appears to be that there's nothing to look at on the skin. Some of the interactivity appears on the smartphone screen, but how are you supposed to remember where you virtually pinned that app on your forearm?

The researchers hope to see their technology integrated into future smartphones, but they will have to convince manufacturers to build the special ring and then convince consumers to wear them.

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Xiaomi, surprisingly, hasn't released any smartwatch to compete with the Apple Watch or dozen of Android Wear smartwatches out there.

The Chinese tech giant is now dipping its toes into smartwatch waters with its first one called the Mi Bunny — designed specifically for kids.

The $50 Mi Bunny, like Xiaomi's other fitness trackers, is low on the tech side. But the few things it does, it likely does well. It's primarily designed for parents to keep track of their kids.

There's no LCD on this guy. It has an LED display that can display 8-bit symbols, kind of like an on a Tamogotchi. 

With the built-in 4G SIM card, kids with the Mi Bunny can send voice messages to pre-set contact numbers and make emergency calls. The smartwatch also connects to Wi-Fi and a smartphone via Bluetooth. Battery life is said to last up to six days on a charge.

GPS lets parents or guardians know their exact location at all times. Parents can use a smartphone app that connects to the Mi Bunny to see their location on a map.

The Mi Bunny is compatible with Android devices running Android 4.2 (or higher) and iOS devices running iOS 8 (or higher).

The smartwatch's silicone band is small enough to fit kiddy wrists, but the limited features could also make it useful to keep tabs on senior citizens if the band fits.

In other Xiaomi news, the company is expected to unveil its Mi Band 2 fitness tracker alongside the Mi Max.

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