Wave Your Hand to Pay for Coffee through Bitcoin? Meet the MEVU Wristband

Wearable technology has been growing in popularity and demand over the past few years, from clothes that automatically heat up when it gets cold, to perhaps the most distinctive example of wearable tech - Google Glass. And whilst everyone's waiting for the much rumoured Apple iWatch, Samsung has in the meantime already released two iterations of their Galaxy Gear smartwatch, albeit with mixed reviews so far, most notably the pretty poor battery life. Having to charge a watch every night can be rather irksome.

Point being, the wearable tech industry is burgeoning, and fast, and with digital currencies' popularity also rising rapidly, it makes sense to combine the two.

The result? A wrist band or bracelet that allows one to purchase items via Bitcoin . Designed by MEVU, a wearable technology startup, the bracelet works by simply waving or flicking your wrist in order to make a payment. MEVU have uploaded a video on to Youtube to show how it functions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK6pUfTe_6Y

I have to admit it looks pretty cool. They further explain,

"At MEVU... we have taken the best of wearable gesture technology and bitcoin's microtransaction capability to allow payment to be done with a simple gesture in the air. This will allow you to buy a cup of coffee without the need to take out your wallet, you just have to perform a simple airsign with our device. Imagine that you are driving out from a parking lot, and while you are approaching the payment facility you just make a gesture with your hand to make the payment, and you can do this without even lowering your car windows."

The wrist band integrates with Coinbase's wallet API, and uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to communicates with a point-of-sales (POS) device. BLE is already used on many mobile devices / tablets, so theoretically the infrastructure is already in place.

MEVU will start accepting pre-orders next month for the wristband.