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Category: wearables – Page 43

We can immediately supersede the Mojo Vision approach for retinal projection, with an interim projection system using metalenses. The Mojo Lens approach is to try to put everything, including the television screen, projection method and energy source onto one contact lens. With recent breakthroughs in scaling up the size of metalenses, an approach utilizing a combination of a contact metalens and a small pair of glasses can be utilized. This is emphatically not the Google Glass approach, which did not use modern metalenses. The system would work as follows:

1)Thin TV cameras are mounted on both sides of a pair of wearable glasses.

2)The images from these cameras are projected via projection metalenses in a narrow beam to the center of the pupils.

3)A contact lens with a tiny metalens mounted in the center, directly over the pupil, projects this projected beam outwards, through the pupil, onto the full width of the curved retina.

The end result would be a 360 degree, full panorama image. This image can either be a high resolution real time vision of the wearer’s surroundings, or can be a projection of a movie, or augmented reality superimposed on the normal field of vision. It can inherently be full-color 3D. Of course such a system will be complemented with ear phones. Modern hearing aids are already so small they can barely be seen, and have batteries that last a week. A pair of ear phones will also allow full 3D sound and also will be the audible complement of augmented vision.

Continue reading “Interim Retinal Projection With Metalenses” | >

Recent advances in the field of robotics have enabled the fabrication of increasingly sophisticated robotic limbs and exoskeletons. Robotic exoskeletons are essentially wearable ‘shells’ made of different robotic parts. Exoskeletons can improve the strength, capabilities and stability of users, helping them to tackle heavy physical tasks with less effort or aiding their rehabilitation after accidents.

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A thermoelectric device is an energy conversion device that uses the voltage generated by the temperature difference between both ends of a material; it is capable of converting heat energy, such as waste heat from industrial sites, into electricity that can be used in daily life. Existing thermoelectric devices are rigid because they are composed of hard metal-based electrodes and semiconductors, hindering the full absorption of heat sources from uneven surfaces. Therefore, researchers have conducted recent studies on the development of flexible thermoelectric devices capable of generating energy in close contact with heat sources such as human skins and hot water pipes.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that a collaborative research team led by Dr. Seungjun Chung from the Soft Hybrid Materials Research Center and Professor Yongtaek Hong from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University (SNU, President OH Se-Jung) developed flexible with high power generation performance by maximizing flexibility and transfer efficiency. The research team also presented a mass-production plan through an automated process including a printing process.

The transfer efficiency of existing substrates used for research on flexible thermoelectric devices is low due to their very . Their heat absorption efficiency is also low due to lack of flexibility, forming a heat shield layer, e.g., air, when in contact with a heat source. To address this issue, organic-material-based thermoelectric devices with high flexibility have been under development, but their application on wearables is not easy because of its significantly lower performance compared to existing inorganic-material-based rigid thermoelectric devices.

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Robo maid I like my coffee light and sweet.

Robots from Japan: the new Toyota robot, giant robot, robot waiter and other technology news 2020. High Technology News 2020. Science and Technology News 2020. The newest and coolest robots from Japan and around the world.

In this issue:

Continue reading “Housemaid Robot from Japan | High-Tech and Robotics News” | >

A research group led by Prof. Chen Tao at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), developed a novel soft self-healing and adhesive human-machine interactive touch pad based on transparent nanocomposite hydrogels, in cooperation with the researchers from the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems of CAS. The study was published in Advanced Materials.

With the rapid development of information technology and the Internet of things, flexible and wearable electronic devices have attracted increasing attention. A is a requisite input device for a mobile phone, smart appliance and point-of-information terminal. Indium tin oxide (ITO) has been used as the dominant transparent conductive film for manufacturing commercial touch pads, which inevitably have obvious shortcomings, like fragility.

To improve the stretchability and biocompatibility of touch pads to allow their interaction with humans, the researchers at NIMTE developed highly transparent and stretchable polyzwitterion-clay nanocomposite hydrogels with transmittance of 98.8% and fracture strain beyond 1500%.

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CSL’s Systems and Networking Research Group (SyNRG) is defining a new sub-area of mobile technology that they call “earable computing.” The team believes that earphones will be the next significant milestone in wearable devices, and that new hardware, software, and apps will all run on this platform.

“The leap from today’s earphones to ‘earables’ would mimic the transformation that we had seen from basic phones to smartphones,” said Romit Roy Choudhury, professor in electrical and (ECE). “Today’s smartphones are hardly a calling device anymore, much like how tomorrow’s earables will hardly be a smartphone accessory.”

Instead, the group believes tomorrow’s earphones will continuously sense , run acoustic augmented reality, have Alexa and Siri whisper just-in-time information, track user motion and health, and offer seamless security, among many other capabilities.

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A team of researchers has developed a flexible, rechargeable silver oxide-zinc battery with a five to 10 times greater areal energy density than state of the art. The battery also is easier to manufacture; while most flexible batteries need to be manufactured in sterile conditions, under vacuum, this one can be screen printed in normal lab conditions. The device can be used in flexible, stretchable electronics for wearables as well as soft robotics.

The team, made up of researchers at the University of California San Diego and California-based company ZPower, details their findings in the Dec. 7 issue of the journal Joule.

“Our batteries can be designed around electronics, instead of electronics needed to be designed around batteries,” said Lu Yin, one of the paper’s co-first authors and a Ph.D. student in the research group of UC San Diego’s nanoengineering Professor Joseph Wang.

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Drexel University researchers are one step closer to offering a new treatment for the millions of patients who suffer from slow-healing, chronic wounds. The battery-powered applicator — as small and light as a watch — is the first portable and potentially wearable device to heal wounds with low-frequency ultrasound.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the research team an estimated $3 million to test the therapy on 120 patients over the next five years. By using diagnostic monitoring of blood flow in the wound tissue, the clinical trial will also determine how nutrition and inflammation impact wound closure, making treatment customization a possibility.

The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, the College of Medicine and the College of Nursing and Health Professions.

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