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Category: wearables – Page 62

What will be the biggest stories of 2019? | Part One | The Economist

Power suits, robotaxis, Leonardo da Vinci mania—just a few of the things to look out for in 2019. But what else will make our top ten stories for the year ahead?

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What will be the biggest stories of the year ahead?

00:35 — 10 — Powered Clothing.
In 2019 power dressing will take on a whole new meaning when this strange-looking clothing hits the market. Not so much high fashion as high tech, it’s a suit with built-in power that will literally get people moving. Part of the wearable robotics revolution, the suit is made up of battery-powered muscle packs which contract just like a human muscle to boost the wearer’s strength. With the global population of over 60s expected to more than double by 2050, and retirement age increasing, there’s no shortage of potential markets. But don’t expect the suits to ease the burden on aching limbs and overstretched health services anytime soon — as these suits don’t come cheap. According to the manufacturer they’ll retail for around the cost of a bespoke tailored suit.

02:13 — 9 — The year of cheap flights.
2019 will be the year low-cost long-haul travel takes off. You’ll be able to buy a ten thousand mile flight from London to Sydney for around $350 and this is why. The world will boast two new state-of-the-art mega hub airports and competition between them will drive down the cost of flying. Daxing Airport outside Beijing is due to open in 2019 and will feed growing demand for air travel in China. Beijing already has one of the world’s biggest airports and for China this new mega hub will send an important message to the world. Rivaling Daxing as a national symbol of global prestige will be a new mega hub airport in Istanbul. Opened in 2018 it covers a staggering 26 square miles — an area larger than the island of Manhattan. And in 2019 consumers will again be the beneficiaries of a state sponsored economic push. But the low fares offered by competition between these hubs could be short-lived.

04:06 — 8 Stonewall riots at 50.

Continue reading “What will be the biggest stories of 2019? | Part One | The Economist” | >

Stretchable thermoelectric coils for energy harvesting in miniature flexible wearable devices

Miniaturized semiconductor devices with energy harvesting features have paved the way to wearable technologies and sensors. Although thermoelectric systems have attractive features in this context, the ability to maintain large temperature differences across device terminals remains increasingly difficult to achieve with accelerated trends in device miniaturization. As a result, a group of scientists in applied sciences and engineering has developed and demonstrated a proposal on an architectural solution to the problem in which engineered thin-film active materials are integrated into flexible three-dimensional (3D) forms.

The approach enabled efficient thermal impedance matching, and multiplied heat flow through the harvester to increase efficient power conversion. In the study conducted by Kewang Nan and colleagues, interconnected arrays of 3D thermoelectric coils were built with microscale ribbons of the active material monocrystalline silicon to demonstrate the proposed concepts. Quantitative measurements and simulations were conducted thereafter to establish the basic operating principles and key design features of the strategy. The results, now published on Science Advances, suggested a scalable strategy to deploy hard thermoelectric thin-films within energy harvesters that can efficiently integrate with soft material systems including human tissue to develop wearable sensors in the future.

Thermoelectric devices provide a platform to incorporate ubiquitous thermal gradients that generate electrical power. To operate wearable sensors or the “Internet of Things” devices, the temperature gradient between the surrounding environment and the human body/inanimate objects should provide small-scale power supplies. Continued advances in the field focus on aggressive downscaling of power requirements for miniaturized systems to enhance their potential in thermoelectric and energy harvesting applications. Integrated processors and radio transmitters for example can operate with power in the range of subnanowatts, some recent examples are driven via ambient light-based energy harvesting and endocochlear potential. Such platforms can be paired with sensors with similar power to enable distributed, continuous and remote environmental/biochemical monitoring.

Material scientists create fabric alternative to batteries for wearable devices

A major factor holding back development of wearable biosensors for health monitoring is the lack of a lightweight, long-lasting power supply. Now scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst led by materials chemist Trisha L. Andrew report that they have developed a method for making a charge-storing system that is easily integrated into clothing for “embroidering a charge-storing pattern onto any garment.”

New flexible, transparent, wearable biopatch, improves cellular observation, drug delivery

Purdue University researchers have developed a new flexible and translucent base for silicon nanoneedle patches to deliver exact doses of biomolecules directly into cells and expand observational opportunities.

“This means that eight or nine nanoneedles can be injected into a single cell without significantly damaging a cell. So we can use these nanoneedles to deliver biomolecules into cells or even tissues with minimal invasiveness,” said Chi Hwan Lee, an assistant professor in Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and School of Mechanical Engineering.

A surgeon performs surgery on the back of a hand of a patient who has melanoma. Purdue researchers are developing a new flexible and translucent base for silicon patches to deliver exact doses of biomolecules directly into cells and expand observational opportunities. The researchers say skin cancer could be one of the applications for the patches.

To be – or not to be – an enhanced human

Should there be any ethical or legal boundaries to technologies that enhance humans? I pondered this last week as I read an online article about the recent trials of upper-body “exoskeletons” by production line staff at Volkswagen and at Chrysler-Fiat. These lightweight wearable frames greatly reduce the physical strain of repetitive overhead assembly work, and will be an important industrial enhancement as workforces age.

We tend to think of medical advancement in terms of better cures for diseases and recovery from injury. Enhancement however goes beyond therapy, and extends us in ways that some may argue are unnatural. Some human enhancements are of course also pre-emptive therapeutic interventions. Vaccination is both an enhancement of our immune system, and a therapeutic intervention. However, in cases where there is little preventative justification, what degree of enhancement is acceptable?

We drink coffee expecting our work performance to improve. We accept non-elective operations, breast implants, orthodontic improvements and other interventions which improve our perception of ourselves. We generally accept such enhancements with little question. However devices and drugs that improve athletic performance can lead us to question their legitimacy.

This Robotic Skin Makes Inanimate Objects Move

When designing a robot, key components are the robot’s sensors, which allow it to perceive its environment, and its actuators, the electrical or pneumatic motors that allow the robot to move and interact with its environment.

Consider your hand, which has temperature and pressure sensors, but also muscles as actuators. The omni-skins, as the Science Robotics paper dubs them, combine sensors and actuators, embedding them into an elastic sheet. The robotic skins are moved by pneumatic actuators or memory alloy that can bounce back into shape. If this is then wrapped around a soft, deformable object, moving the skin with the actuators can allow the object to crawl along a surface.

The key to the design here is flexibility: rather than adding chips, sensors, and motors into every household object to turn them into individual automatons, the same skin can be used for many purposes. “We can take the skins and wrap them around one object to perform a task—locomotion, for example—and then take them off and put them on a different object to perform a different task, such as grasping and moving an object,” said Kramer-Bottiglio. “We can then take those same skins off that object and put them on a shirt to make an active wearable device.”