Forget Smart Watches, Here Comes the Death Watch

Article originally appeared on Popular Mechanics

Don’t tell Roy from The IT Crowd, but the death watch is here.

After the mixed response to the Apple Watch, no one is sure if smart watches are really worthwhile, let alone if anyone is ever going to buy one. But that’s probably just because they don’t know about Tikker yet. Because Tikker is the smart watch so smart that it tells you exactly when you’ll die.

That’s right, using a person’s age, medical history, and gender, Tikker computes exactly how long they have left to live and then displays it in months, days, hours, minutes, and yes, seconds. Helpfully, it also displays the exact (!) date when you will die.

Obviously, Tikker isn’t totally accurate (yet), and the death date it gives you is really just an estimate. But still, how fun is that?

Weirdly, Swedish author and former gravedigger, Fredrik Colting invented the macabre timepiece. Colting is most famous for 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, his controversial “sequel” to The Catcher in the Rye, which is now banned in the United States for copyright infringement. Here’s hoping his latest invention won’t suffer the same fate.

Cheers.