New York: Researchers at Penn State have developed a smart tissue box that says "bless you" when you sneeze.
The talking tissue box and a refrigerator that tells you when it`s time to buy milk were among the futuristic ideas presented at a tech conference in Paris, the New York Daily News reported.
"Smart objects will become more and more a part of our daily lives," study lead S. Shyam Sundar, professor of communications at Penn State in the US said.
"We believe the next phase is that objects will start talking and interacting with humans, and our goal is to figure out the best ways for objects to communicate with humans," he said.
For their study, researchers recruited 63 subjects who were under the guise that they were taking part in a cognitive games study.
Rather, the research team filmed their reactions to a talking tissue box.
Once a lab worker sneeze d, the box would reply "bless you." Then it would say "here, take a tissue" and "take care."
ANI
