Lifeboat Foundation

Two young visually impaired Southampton fans were finally able to be mascots and watch their beloved Saints in action against Manchester United at the weekend thanks to life-changing wearable technology provided by Virgin Media.

Florence and Joshua both experience issues with their eyesight, meaning that they have never been able to clearly see their favourite team play. Back in March 2,020 Virgin Media gave them cutting-edge technology before they were due to take on the role of mascots for the game against Manchester City.

Technion scientists have created a wearable motion sensor capable of identifying movements such as bending and twisting. This smart ‘e-skin’ was produced using a highly stretchable electronic material, which essentially forms an electronic skin capable of recognizing the range of movement human joints normally make, with up to half a degree precision.

This breakthrough is the result of collaborative work between researchers from different fields in the Laboratory for Nanomaterial-Based Devices, headed by Professor Hossam Haick from the Technion Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering. It was recently published in Advanced Materials and was featured on the journal’s cover.

This wearable motion sensor, which senses bending and twisting, can be applied in healthcare and manufacturing.

Circa 2009

The researchers expect to have a working prototype of the product in four years. “We are just at the beginning of this project,” Wang said. “During the first two years, our primary focus will be on the sensor systems. Integrating enzyme logic onto electrodes that can read biomarker inputs from the body will be one of our first major challenges.”

“Achieving the goal of the program is estimated to take nearly a decade,” Chrisey said.

Continue reading “Hospital on a chip” »

Circa 2013

Wearable Futures: London designer and researcher Shamees Aden is developing a concept for running shoes that would be 3D-printed from synthetic biological material and could repair themselves overnight.

Shamees Aden’s Protocells trainer would be 3D-printed to the exact size of the user’s foot from a material that would fit like a second skin. It would react to pressure and movement created when running, puffing up to provide extra cushioning where required.

Continue reading “Protocell trainers made from 3D-printed protocells” »

The Future of Everything covers the innovation and technology transforming the way we live, work and play, with monthly issues on health, money, cities and more. This month is Education & Learning, online starting Aug. 6 and in the paper on Aug. 13.

No one has yet deciphered the brain signals that encode a complex thought, turn an idea into words or make a lasting memory. But powerful clues are emerging to drive the neurotechnology of learning, scientists say.

On the frontier of neuroscience, researchers are inventing devices to enhance learning abilities, from wearable nerve stimulators that boost mental focus to headsets for wireless brain-to-brain communication.

Artificial camouflage is the functional mimicry of the natural camouflage that can be observed in a wide range of species^1,2,3. Especially, since the 1800s, there were a lot of interesting studies on camouflage technology for military purposes which increases survivability and identification of an anonymous object as belonging to a specific military force^4,5. Along with previous studies on camouflage technology and natural camouflage, artificial camouflage is becoming an important subject for recently evolving technologies such as advanced soft robotics^1,6,7,8 electronic skin in particular^9,10,11,12. Background matching and disruptive coloration are generally claimed to be the underlying principles of camouflage covering many detailed subprinciples¹³, and these necessitate not only simple coloration but also a selective expression of various disruptive patterns according to the background. While the active camouflage found in nature mostly relies on the mechanical action of the muscle cells^14,15,16, artificial camouflage is free from matching the actual anatomies of the color-changing animals and therefore incorporates much more diverse strategies^{17,18,19,20,21,22}, but the dominant technology for the practical artificial camouflage at visible regime (400–700 nm wavelength), especially RGB domain, is not fully established so far. Since the most familiar and direct camouflage strategy is to exhibit a similar color to the background^23,24,25, a prerequisite of an artificial camouflage at a unit device level is to convey a wide range of the visible spectrum that can be controlled and changed as occasion demands^26,27,28. At the same time, the corresponding unit should be flexible and mechanically robust, especially for wearable purposes, to easily cover the target body as attachable patches without interrupting the internal structures, while being compatible with the ambient conditions and the associated movements of the wearer^29,30.

System integration of the unit device into a complete artificial camouflage device, on the other hand, brings several additional issues to consider apart from the preceding requirements. Firstly, the complexity of the unit device is anticipated to be increased as the sensor and the control circuit, which are required for the autonomous retrieval and implementation of the adjacent color, are integrated into a multiplexed configuration. Simultaneously, for nontrivial body size, the concealment will be no longer effective with a single unit unless the background consists of a monotone. As a simple solution to this problem, unit devices are often laterally pixelated^12,18 to achieve spatial variation in the coloration. Since its resolution is determined by the numbers of the pixelated units and their sizes, the conception of a high-resolution artificial camouflage device that incorporates densely packed arrays of individually addressable multiplexed units leads to an explosive increase in the system complexity. While on the other hand, solely from the perspective of camouflage performance, the delivery of high spatial frequency information is important for more natural concealment by articulating the texture and the patterns of the surface to mimic the microhabitats of the living environments^31,32. As a result, the development of autonomous and adaptive artificial camouflage at a complete device level with natural camouflage characteristics becomes an exceptionally challenging task.

Our strategy is to combine thermochromic liquid crystal (TLC) ink with the vertically stacked multilayer silver (Ag) nanowire (NW) heaters to tackle the obstacles raised from the earlier concept and develop more practical, scalable, and high-performance artificial camouflage at a complete device level. The tunable coloration of TLC, whose reflective spectrum can be controlled over a wide range of the visible spectrum within the narrow range of temperature^33,34, has been acknowledged as a potential candidate for artificial camouflage applications before^21,34, but its usage has been more focused on temperature measurement^35,36,37,38 owing to its high sensitivity to the temperature change. The susceptible response towards temperature is indeed an unfavorable feature for the thermal stability against changes in the external environment, but also enables compact input range and low power consumption during the operation once the temperature is accurately controlled.

Deployment of functional circuits on a 3D freeform surface is of significant interest to wearable devices on curvilinear skin/tissue surfaces or smart Internet-of-Things with sensors on 3D objects. Here we present a new fabrication strategy that can directly print functional circuits either transient or long-lasting onto freeform surfaces by intense pulsed light-induced mass transfer of zinc nanoparticles (Zn NPs). The intense pulsed light can locally raise the temperature of Zn NPs to cause evaporation. Lamination of a kirigami-patterned soft semi-transparent polymer film with Zn NPs conforming to a 3D surface results in condensation of Zn NPs to form conductive yet degradable Zn patterns onto a 3D freeform surface for constructing transient electronics. Immersing the Zn patterns into a copper sulfate or silver nitrate solution can further convert the transient device to a long-lasting device with copper or silver. Functional circuits with integrated sensors and a wireless communication component on 3D glass beakers and seashells with complex surface geometries demonstrate the viability of this manufacturing strategy.

Bio-Digital Twins, Quantum Computing, And Precision Medicine — Mr. Kazuhiro Gomi, President and CEO, and Dr. Joe Alexander, MD, Ph.D., Director, Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab, NTT Research.

Mr. Kazuhiro Gomi, is President and CEO of NTT Research (https://ntt-research.com/), a division of The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, commonly known as NTT (https://www.global.ntt/), a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Mr. Gomi has been at NTT for more than 30 years and was involved in product management/product development activities at the beginning of his tenure. In September of 2009, Mr. Gomi was first named to the Global Telecoms Business Power100 — a list of the 100 most powerful and influential people in the telecoms industry. He was the CEO of NTT America Inc. from 2010 to 2019 and also served on the Board of Directors at NTT Communications from 2012 to 2019. Mr. Gomi received a Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Keio University, Tokyo. Mr. Gomi is a member of the board at US Japan Council, a non-profit organization aimed at fostering a better relationship between the US and Japan.

Continue reading “Kazuhiro Gomi & Dr. Joe Alexander — Bio-Digital Twins, Quantum Computing, Precision Medicine — NTT” »

Sony has announced a follow-up product to the Reon Pocket, the app-controlled “wearable air conditioner” it released last year after crowdfunding it on the company’s own platform. The Reon Pocket 2 looks more or less the same as the original model, but the newly designed internals can achieve up to twice the level of heat absorption, according to Sony, resulting in more powerful cooling performance. Sony also says that it’s improved the sweat-proofing in the Reon Pocket 2, making it more suitable for light exercise situations.

Just in time for summer.