A wearable fingertip sensor continuously measures levodopa levels in sweat, which could enable personalized dosing for patients with Parkinson’s disease.
Category: wearables
Single patch merges multiple physiological signals for simpler health monitoring
Wearable health monitors have grown increasingly capable, but most are still limited by the fact that tracking different types of body signals requires separate sensors, each with its own circuitry and patch of skin. That leads to bulkier devices, higher power consumption and greater discomfort for anyone who needs round-the-clock monitoring.
A research team led by Assistant Professor Liu Yuxin from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS CDE), has developed a cross-modal skin sensor that overcomes this constraint.
Named X-Sig, the device fuses the body’s electrical impulses, such as heart rhythms and muscle signals, with its mechanical signals, such as pulse pressure waves and the forces generated by muscle contractions, into a single composite waveform transmitted through one channel.
Soft exosuit shows motor-free path to wearable walking assistance
Researchers in China have unveiled a new robotic exosuit driven entirely by soft artificial muscles instead of traditional motors. This technology could make it easier for older adults, injured patients or factory workers to walk with much less effort. Current exosuits that aid walking use heavy motors, gearboxes and noisy air-pressure pumps that restrict a person’s natural movement.
Soft muscles, on the other hand, are made of thin, flexible rubber fibers that behave more like human muscles and are considerably lighter, making it easier for people to move.
Details of the work are in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
Molecules stop carbon nanotubes clumping, unlocking record heat-to-electricity performance
QUT researchers have overcome a challenge that has limited next-generation energy-harvesting materials for more than two decades, opening the door to more powerful wearable electronics and new ways of turning wasted heat into electricity. The breakthrough centers on carbon nanotubes, which are flexible, conductive microscopic rods that have long shown promise for wearable technologies but have been difficult to control.
QUT researchers have developed a new molecular strategy that prevents the nanotubes from clumping together and losing performance, enabling a new benchmark for materials that convert heat directly into electricity.
Lead author and QUT PhD researcher Shanshan Zhou said the work established a new way of tackling one of the biggest challenges facing carbon nanotubes.
Mechanical engineers develop buttons that rise with light
No wires. No actuators. Shine light on the metal surface, and it rises like a button. KAIST researchers have developed a metal structure that changes shape using light, without any light-absorbing coating. This technology could open new possibilities for tactile interfaces with physical pop-up buttons, shape displays, next-generation wearable devices and soft robots.
A research team led by Professor Il-Kwon Oh from the Department of Mechanical Engineering has developed a technology that transforms a flat NiTi shape-memory alloy (SMA) sheet into a “photothermally driven meta-morphing structure” that rises from a flat surface into a three-dimensional form when exposed to light, using only a single UV laser process.
The results are published in the journal Advanced Science.
The invisible wearable: New skin sensors advance health monitoring
While wearable health sensors are becoming increasingly common, current iterations are awkward to wear. For example, devices attached to the face can draw unwanted attention, increase self-consciousness and influence the signals users are trying to measure. However, recent research may have found a solution by introducing ultrathin sensors that cannot be seen by observers or felt by the wearer.
In an article published in Science Advances, researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, and collaborating institutions reported developing thin, stretchable on-skin electrodes that are effectively invisible when worn on the face. The new technology can measure biological signals while remaining undetectable by eye and touch, allowing monitoring to take place under more natural conditions.
Biosignals such as eye movements, facial muscle activity and brain activity provide valuable information for health care monitoring and human-machine interaction. However, conventional facial electrodes can alter a person’s appearance and affect social interactions, creating what are called appearance artifacts—changes in behavior or psychological state caused simply by wearing a device that the individual and others can see.
Moisture-driven tech can power green batteries—and destroy spy gear
Researchers from North Carolina State University and Rice University have created a nontoxic, stretchable battery that operates by extracting moisture from the ambient environment—even in climates as dry as the desert. The batteries could be useful in Internet of Things (IoT) applications ranging from wearables to advanced surveillance monitors with built-in kill switches. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
Emerging technologies like wearable monitors, miniature robotics and other IoT devices require lightweight, flexible power sources. Conventional batteries, which represent the best power source options, are often too rigid and heavy to be useful, and they contain toxic materials that can leak. Energy harvesters, so called because they capture energy from the surrounding environment and convert it into electrical power, are lighter, but their performance is limited.
Running on moisture and salt The new moisture-activated battery (MAB) includes a magnesium anode and a silver/silver chloride cathode, with a cellulose membrane loaded with lithium chloride salts that serves as a separator. The separator harvests moisture from ambient air, which dissolves the salts and creates the electrolyte, allowing charge to flow through the battery.
SensorFM: Towards a general intelligence and interface for wearable health data
We present SensorFM, a foundation model for wearable health pre-trained on more than one trillion minutes of sensor data from five million people. By co-scaling model size and data, SensorFM learns a general-purpose representation of human physiology that transfers to 35 health prediction tasks, supports label-efficient adaptation and data infilling, and can serve as a grounding tool for a Personal Health Agent.
UCSF and Samsung launch remote study on aging brain health
An innovative new study from the Neuroscape research center at UCSF, and consumer electronics giant Samsung seeks to understand decade-by-decade changes in brain health.
The Neuroscape Technology for Aging Health — Digital Approaches (TAH-DA) longitudinal study, seeks to identify biometric predictors of cognitive decline over the course of a year, using Samsung wearable technology.
Samsung fosters innovation and transformational health research in collaboration with leading institutions to explore new health technologies and a novel prescriptive on wellness. The TAH-DA study is another example of Samsung’s work to understand the unique connection between the brain and wellness.