Selfie-taking drone that attaches to the wrist wins $500,000 award

A selfie-taking drone that can be attached to the wrist has won a $500,000 award in Intel's Make it Wearable competition, agency reports said.

Intel kicked off the `Make It Wearable (MIW) Challenge' 11 months ago, with the aim of identifying technology that fitted into people's lives seamlessly and meaningfully improved daily life.

The prize has been won by a three-member team, which developed a wristband that turned into a camera-equipped drone.

Aimed at outdoor enthusiasts, the Nixie quadcopter can take off from one's wrist, click pictures in the sky, and return like a boomerang. It also synched with smart phones, 'pocket-lint.Com' reported.

The Nixie team members include Christoph Kohstall, a Stanford postdoctoral researcher, Jelena Jovanovic and Michael Miedermayer.

The second prize of $200,000 was won by Open Bionics - a robotic prosthetic hand capable of replicating advanced functionality - all for under $1,000.

ProGlove, the third-place winner won $100,000 and has been described a "professional wearable production tool" that assembly line workers could wear to improve quality.

Intel Corp hopes the contest would help guarantee it a leading position in the emerging market for wearable computing devices, Reuters reported.

The company, which had in recent years been slow to embrace smart phones and tablets, was keen to make sure its processors were at the front of future technology trends.

The ''Make it Wearable'' contest was launched by CEO Brian Krzanich in January, to encourage and hobbyists to use Intel's chips to develop new kinds of wearable technology. The prize money would help winners bring their prototype to market.

"This was an experiment to see what we could do in this space and see what kind of creativity we could spawn," Krzanich said at an award event on Monday. "The real value in this was the diversity of the teams and ideas."

Among the entries that made it to the final was a pad that allows premature babies in incubators feel the heartbeat of their mothers, as also a necklace that uses patterns of pulses felt on the chest to give cyclists turn-by-turn directions so they would not have to look at their smart phones.

Though a companies like Samsung Electronics, Motorola and others were rolling out growing numbers of smart watches and fitness bands, the wearable category had yet to gain major traction with consumers. Apple has plans to roll out a smartwatch in 2015.