This Wearable Gives You a True Superpower: a Sixth Sense for the ISS

Wearable tech can be a bit of a joke. It's largely embarrassing to wear, questionable in its accu​racy, and at the end of the day doesn't exactly do anything groundbreaking. Are fancy pedometers the future we were promised?

This little hacked-together device featured on t​he DIY blog Hackaday, however, bestows upon its wearer a veritable space age superpower: the ability to know whenever the International Space Station is nearby (relatively speaking). It's like a really niche sixth sense.

The gadget is currently part of a ​Kickstarter campaign led by amateur astronomer and programmer Liam Kennedy, who previously crowdfunded the ISS Ab​ove, a Raspberry Pi-based device that lights up whenever the station is overhead. Depending where you live, this happens several times a day.

The wearable is a new add-on that comes with an old-school ISS embroidered patch and a ring of LEDs that freak out when the ISS is in position. It works in conjunction with the bigger ISS Above gadget, of which Kennedy claims there are currently over 800 around the world, which programs up to 50 future passes of the ISS in advance.

What's the point of it? Fun and inspiration, and a humbling reminder that there's a $150 billion feat of technology orbiting somewhere overhead while you're busy counting all the steps you take in a day.

As Kennedy says in his campaign video, "I say it makes a difference when you know that this football field-sized piece of human engineering is in your skies—and even more importantly, that you happen to know that the only six human beings in space are above you right now."