Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: wearables

DARPA has awarded funding to six organizations to support the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N) program, first announced in March 2018. Battelle Memorial Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Rice University, and Teledyne Scientific are leading multidisciplinary teams to develop high-resolution, bidirectional brain-machine interfaces for use by able-bodied service members. These wearable interfaces could ultimately enable diverse national security applications such as control of active cyber defense systems and swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles, or teaming with computer systems to multitask during complex missions.

“DARPA is preparing for a future in which a combination of unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, and cyber operations may cause conflicts to play out on timelines that are too short for humans to effectively manage with current technology alone,” said Al Emondi, the N program manager. “By creating a more accessible brain-machine interface that doesn’t require surgery to use, DARPA could deliver tools that allow mission commanders to remain meaningfully involved in dynamic operations that unfold at rapid speed.”

Over the past 18 years, DARPA has demonstrated increasingly sophisticated neurotechnologies that rely on surgically implanted electrodes to interface with the central or peripheral nervous systems. The agency has demonstrated achievements such as neural control of prosthetic limbs and restoration of the sense of touch to the users of those limbs, relief of otherwise intractable neuropsychiatric illnesses such as depression, and improvement of memory formation and recall. Due to the inherent risks of surgery, these technologies have so far been limited to use by volunteers with clinical need.

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Up-and-coming fashion designer Ganit Goldstein may not have had her 3D printed wearables on display at the recent Met Gala (where Zac Posen became the latest designer to use 3D printing in his work), but her designs are striking nonetheless. Her most recent collection, Shifted Craft, was debuted at Milan Design Week last month.

Goldstein prides herself as a fashion designer working at the intersection of craft and technology. This means she frequently combines new technologies, such as 3D scanning, modeling and printing with more traditional textile and garment-making practices. Shifted Craft, which comprises seven pieces of jewelry and two pairs of shoes, embodies these overlapping approaches seamlessly and stylishly.

Ganit Goldstein Shifted Souls

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Smart watches. Pacemakers. Internet-connected glasses. These are devices designed to make life easier. And yet, all this wearable technology can be hacked. The devices send personal health information to your smartphone over the airways, so anyone with the know-how could scoop it up and steal it. But now, researchers at Northeastern have a better, more secure idea: Send data through your body.

Associate professor Kaushik Chowdhury worked with a team of researchers from the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil to develop a safe, hacker-proof method to transmit sensitive data.

“The truth is, no matter what I do when it comes to wireless devices, I’m radiating the signal through the air,” Chowdhury says. “There is the danger that the signal can be jammed, or analyzed by someone else. Our method secures this so it can’t be leaked.”

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We’re used to the security risks posed by someone hacking into our computers, tablets, and smartphones, but what about pacemakers and other implanted medical devices? To help prevent possible murder-by-hacker, engineers at Purdue University have come up with a watch-like device that turns the human body into its own network as a way to keep personal technology private.

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A team of researchers led by Dr. Nazmul Karim and Prof Sir Kostya Novoselov at The University of Manchester have developed a method to produce scalable graphene-based yarn.

Multi-functional wearable e-textiles have been a focus of much attention due to their great potential for healthcare, sportswear, fitness and aerospace applications.

Graphene has been considered a potentially good material for these types of applications due to its high conductivity, and flexibility. Every atom in is exposed to its environment allowing it to sense changes in its surroundings, making it an ideal material for sensors.

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Michelle Khine is a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Nine months ago, her newborn son was hospitalized for complications during childbirth and was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). While in the NICU, her son was connected to several machines that were supplying oxygen and monitoring his breathing.

A biomedical engineering research team from the University of California has developed a new wearable respiratory sensor to monitor children with chronic pulmonary conditions. The design was built with inspiration from a favorite childhood toy, Shrinky Dinks.

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Recently University of Glasgow developed a Graphene based E-Skin for prosthetic limbs. The research started with making a prosthetic arm that could sense even the minutest of pressure for gripping soft objects. It eventually yielded a prosthetic limb that was also self powering.

This was because of the development of Graphene based supercapacitors.

Graphene is now being explored for wearable electronics and health pathes because of its flexibility and ability to pick the smallest of signals.

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Circa 2016

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Electronic materials have been a major stumbling block for the advance of flexible electronics because existing materials do not function well after breaking and healing. A new electronic material created by an international team, however, can heal all its functions automatically even after breaking multiple times. This material could improve the durability of wearable electronics.

“Wearable and bendable electronics are subject to mechanical deformation over time, which could destroy or break them,” said Qing Wang, professor of materials science and engineering, Penn State. “We wanted to find an electronic material that would repair itself to restore all of its functionality, and do so after multiple breaks.”

Self-healable materials are those that, after withstanding physical deformation such as being cut in half, naturally repair themselves with little to no external influence.

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