Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: wearables – Page 9

While wearable technologies with embedded sensors, such as smartwatches, are widely available, these devices can be uncomfortable, obtrusive and can inhibit the skin’s intrinsic sensations.

“If you want to accurately sense anything on a biological surface like skin or a leaf, the interface between the device and the surface is vital,” said Professor Yan Yan Shery Huang from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research. “We also want bioelectronics that are completely imperceptible to the user, so they don’t in any way interfere with how the user interacts with the world, and we want them to be sustainable and low waste.”

There are multiple methods for making wearable sensors, but these all have drawbacks. Flexible electronics, for example, are normally printed on plastic films that don’t allow gas or moisture to pass through, so it would be like wrapping your skin in plastic film. Other researchers have recently developed flexible electronics that are gas-permeable, like artificial skins, but these still interfere with normal sensation, and rely on energy-and waste-intensive manufacturing techniques.

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Scientists use laser ablation technology to develop a deformable micro-supercapacitor. Professor Jin Kon Kim and Dr. Keon-Woo Kim from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), in collaboration with Dr. Chanwoo Yang and Researcher Seong Ju Park from the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH), have achieved a significant breakthrough in developing a small-scale energy storage device capable of stretching, twisting, folding, and wrinkling. Their research has been published in the electronic engineering journal, npj Flexible Electronics.

The advent of wearable technology has brought with it a pressing need for energy storage solutions that can keep pace with the flexibility and stretchability of soft electronic devices.

Micro supercapacitors (MSCs) have emerged as a promising candidate for deformable energy storage, due to high-power density, rapid charging, and long cycle life.

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What if changes in a person’s stress levels could be detected while they sleep using wearable devices? A new study by University of Vermont researchers published in PLOS Digital Health is the first to find changes in perceived stress levels reflected in sleep data—an important step towards identifying biomarkers that may help flag individuals in need of support.

Given how critical sleep is to physical and mental health, the research team suspected signals might exist in sleep data, says Laura Bloomfield, a research assistant professor of mathematics and statistics and lead author of the study. “Changes in stress are visible.”

When parsing baseline sleep data, the researchers found “consistent associations” between people’s perceived stress scores and factors such as total sleep time, resting heart rate and heart rate variability, and respiratory rate.

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Traditional AUVs rely on thrusters or pumps to adjust depth, which consumes considerable energy and generates noise. Team BayMax’s design replaces this system with a BCD that employs reversible hydrogen fuel cells. By splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen gases, the BCD can precisely control the ROV’s buoyancy, mimicking the swim bladders found in fish.

This approach offers many advantages. “The cool thing about this for us is that it’s cutting-edge technology,” remarked Bare. We’re the first to implement it in a device with such comprehensive controls, making it truly groundbreaking.”

Professor Ghorbel echoed Bare’s enthusiasm, highlighting the technology’s vast potential. “This highly energy-efficient and silent system has applications beyond AUVs,” he explained. “It holds promise for material intelligence, wearable assistive devices, and even adaptive robotic garments.”

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The Limitless Pendant is part of the whole Limitless system, which the company is launching today. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering: yes, it’s very much a reference to the movie.) Siroker’s last AI product, Rewind, was an app that ran on your computer and would record your screen and other data in order to help you remember every tab, every song, every meeting, everything you do on your computer. (When the company first teased the Limitless Pendant, it was actually called the Rewind Pendant.) Limitless has similar aims, but instead of just running on your computer, it’s meant to collect data in the cloud and the real world, too, and make it all available to you on any device. Rewind is still around, for the folks who want the all-local, one-computer approach — but Siroker says the cross-platform opportunity is much bigger.

“The core job to be done is initially around meetings,” Siroker tells me. “Preparing you for meetings, transcribing meetings, giving you real-time notes of meetings and summaries of meetings.” For $20 a month, the app will capture audio from your computer’s mic and speakers, and you can also give it access to your email and calendar. With that combination — and ultimately all the other apps you use for work, Siroker says — Limitless can do a lot to help you keep track of conversations. What was that new app someone mentioned in the board meeting? What restaurant did Shannon say we should go to next time? Where did I leave off with Jake when we met two weeks ago? In theory, Limitless can get that data and use AI models to get it back to you anytime you ask.

Siroker and I are talking the day after the first reviews of the Humane AI Pin came out, and he’s careful to differentiate his company’s approach from these all-encompassing AI tools. “We’re trying to do a few things exceptionally well, not be a mile wide and an inch deep,” he says. “We’re not, you know, trying to reinvent the wheel with lasers.” His plan is to integrate into all the apps you use and put Limitless inside of those apps; you should be able to take notes in Notion or get action items in Slack, he thinks, instead of having to go to some other app entirely. “Why would I even have to make you log into my cloud based app, when I could just have you show up to the thing you’re already using?”

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Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have developed an organic photovoltaic film that is both waterproof and flexible, allowing a solar cell to be put onto slothes and still function correctly after being rained on or even washed.

One of the potential uses of organic photovoltaics is to create wearable electronics — devices that can be attached to clothing that can monitor medical devices, for example, without requiring battery changes.

However, researchers have found it challenging to achieve waterproofing without the use of extra layers that end up decreasing the flexibility of the film.

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Professor Jiyun Kim and his team at the Department of Material Science and Engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) have developed a pioneering technology capable of identifying human emotions in real time. This cutting-edge innovation is set to revolutionize various industries, including next-generation wearable systems that provide services based on emotions.

Understanding and accurately extracting emotional information has long been a challenge due to the abstract and ambiguous nature of human affects such as emotions, moods, and feelings. To address this, the research team has developed a multi-modal human emotion recognition system that combines verbal and non-verbal expression data to efficiently utilize comprehensive emotional information.

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