Project Ara is the codename for an initiative by Google that aims to develop a free, open hardware platform for creating highly flexible smartphones.
It will include a structural frame that holds smartphone sections of the owner's choice, which are assembled into metal frames such as a display, keyboard or an extra battery. It would allow users to swap out malfunctioning parts or upgrade individual modules as innovations emerge, providing longer lifetime cycles for the handset, and potentially reducing electronic waste.
Google plan to provide a skeleton of a device, therefore, the developers could create and sell modules. So, instead of upgrading your phone because you want a more powerful camera, you can just simply purchase a 4k camera module for your device, and switch it out, allowing you to truly customize the actual hardware of your device in seconds.
As the technology progresses, the amount of functions now possible with a smartphone is slowly increasing and getting more important. With the recent addition of having heart rate monitors directly integrated into some Android and IOS devices, it's safe to say that using our phones to track our health is becoming increasingly common.
But Google's Project Ara team has taken things to the next innovative level, and has developed a module that can actually track your blood oxygen level.
Paul Eremenko, who works as Google's technical lead for Project Ara, demonstrated how this newly developed module can read blood oxygen levels by simply touching a sensor located on the module. The module demonstrated is actually a prototype of what's called a "pulse oximeter", which is used to track the amount of oxygen that's in the blood.
Though, aside from getting announcements about what Google's Ara phone can can do, the release date still remains unknown.
Paul did comment that "we do intend to do a consumer pilot later in 2015″, with an announcement from Google expected in January at the Project Ara developer conference.
