Almost every day, a new device or invention hits the market providing comfort, enjoyment or luxury to the user. People who use their imagination and ingenuity can create new gadgets that are both useful and fun. Take, for example, the iRobot Corporation that patented the iRobot that washes floors and the Roomba that vacuums carpets without your guidance.

Other new gadgets that have hit the market or are about to hit the market are the Hidden Wall Outlet mini wall safe. It looks like an electrical outlet, but it opens to store a valuable piece of jewelry. Simkey Simcard Backup comes in handy when you lose your cell phone and all those important contact numbers. This backup system saves your data and recovers it in an instant. It also has mini PDA functions such as date scheduler, memo, alarm clock, world and local time, currency converter and password protection. The compact MP3 alarm clock has 127 MB of memory and can upload music directly to your PC. It has a snooze function, and an LCD screen with backlit controls is handy to help you set your alarm. Researcher Deb Roy developed a new baby monitoring system that uses cameras and microphones connected throughout the house to monitor the baby 24 hours a day. You can record the development of the baby and turn off the cameras when you need to.

To monitor her son’s early language development, researcher Deb Roy has wired her home with 11 cameras and 14 microphones. The baby will be monitored for 14 hours a day to observe her development over time. Roy and his wife can delete the recordings or turn off the cameras if they need to get intimate or curse each other, but at the end of the day the video is sent to MIT for computer processing. Dr. Roy’s goal is to discover how babies learn language using computer algorithms.