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Category: electronics – Page 70

With CES 2018 now in full swing, it’s time to explore what Intel, Samsung, Toyota, and other companies have in store for the future of consumer electronics.

The 2018 Consumer Electronics Show is now in full swing. Between now and Friday, January 12, all kinds of technology — both conceptual and practical — will be unveiled and trotted out in front of audiences. We’ve already written about what you can expect to see from CES 2018, but as day one draws to a close, it’s a good time to check-in on what’s already trending.

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Contact-free measurement of vital signs is already a reality, but with a few important limitations some of which researchers at Cornell University may be able to overcome. Currently used devices typically require the patient to be in close proximity to the sensor, and they’re only able to measure the breathing and heart rates, along with body movement.

Technology developed at Cornell involves tags worn on clothing, or just placed near the patient, that emit radio waves toward the lungs and heart to measure their activity accurately, while allowing the patient to move around. Additionally, blood pressure may also be measured this way, but more work will be required to validate the technology.

The new technique relies on so-called near-field coherent sensing, which allows each tag to have a unique radio signal. This permits many patients in the same facility to be monitored uniquely and without any interference.

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Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for directly printing metal circuits, creating flexible, stretchable electronics. The technique can use multiple metals and substrates and is compatible with existing manufacturing systems that employ direct printing technologies.

“Flexible electronics hold promise for use in many fields, but there are significant manufacturing costs involved — which poses a challenge in making them practical for commercial use,” says Jingyan Dong, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor in NC State’s Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering.

“Our approach should reduce cost and offer an efficient means of producing with high resolution, making them viable for integrating into commercial devices,” Dong says.

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New Zealand-built technology enabling an entirely new type of wearable

AUCKLAND, NOVEMBER 22, 2017 — StretchSense Ltd., New Zealand-based manufacturer of wearable sensing systems, today is proud to see the release of ZozoSuit by its client and investor Start Today Co., Ltd., owner of Japan’s largest online fashion retailer. The first consumer-ready wearable product built with StretchSense’s unique sensor technology, the ZozoSuit was developed in close collaboration between the two companies and provides precise measurement of body shape to solve the problem of fit when buying clothes online.

StretchSense’s mission is to go beyond wearables and towards “disappearables” — truly smart garments with unobtrusive sensors and electronics that feel invisible to the wearer. The ZozoSuit is a realization of that vision, blurring the line between clothing and technology with lightweight sensing elements, flexible cabling and miniaturized electronics all fully integrated into a skin-tight garment.

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Gaps in coverage leave interceptors less-equipped to defeat the threats of tomorrow.

No missile defense is better than the sensors that tell the interceptors where to go and what to kill. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, draws upon considerably more sensors for homeland defense than when operations began in 2004, but shortfalls remain. The North Korean and other missile threats are not diminishing, and it’s time to get this right.

In a forthcoming report, we recommend that the Defense Department and Missile Defense Agency take several steps to improve the sensor backbone of America’s homeland missile defenses, including fielding a space layer, filling radar gaps, adding omnidirectional focus, and improving command and control. Unfortunately, the budget for missile defense sensors has fallen considerably over the past decade, exactly the wrong trend for our changing security environment.

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A sample integrated circuit printed on fabric. (credit: Felice Torrisi)

Researchers at the University of Cambridge, working with colleagues in Italy and China, have incorporated washable, stretchable, and breathable integrated electronic circuits into fabric for the first time — opening up new possibilities for smart textiles and wearable textile electronic devices.

The circuits were made with cheap, safe, and environmentally friendly inks, and printed using conventional inkjet-printing techniques.

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As luck would have it, we may be on the verge of another revolution in miniaturization, this time through nanoelectronics.

Creating electronics at the nanoscale is difficult and has faced limitations but those limitations may be a thing of the past. Researchers from the National University of Singapore have developed a “converter” for nanoelectronic devices that could allow them to use plasmons for data processing.

To understand why that’s so important though, it’s best we start by explaining how nanoelectronic devices work.

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A demonstration of the pressure sensor built by bacteria in action as a researcher taps out some Morse code.

As wonderfully bizarre as it sounds, growing touch screens from a bacterial soup isn’t the team’s ultimate goal.

Materials scientists have long sought to blur the line between the inorganic and organic, explain Neydis Morales and Dr. Megan McClean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who were not involved in the work.

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