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Category: wearables

Imagine if your electronic wearable device, like your Fitbit, adhered to you like a sticker or temporary tattoo and could read your pulse or measure hand gestures. As electronics are becoming thinner, lighter, and more power efficient, they can be populated on stickers and temporary tattoos to create soft wearables that adhere to the skin. And the most exciting news is that one day you may be able to print these wearable electronics from a home printer.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Mechanical Engineering Professor Carmel Majidi, Ph.D. student Eric Markvicka, and previous postdoctoral fellow Michael Bartlett (now a professor at Iowa State University) have created a method to print skin-mountable electronics in a quick and cost-effective way.

“One of the remaining challenges in skin-mounted electronics is to interface soft circuits with the rigid microchips and electronics hardware required for sensing, digital processing, and power,” said Majidi. “We address this with a breakthrough digital fabrication technique that enables efficient creation of wireless electronics on a soft, water-resistant, medical-grade adhesive.”

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If you don’t like the thought of bugs crawling all over you, then you might not like one possible direction in which the field of wearable electronics is heading. Researchers from MIT and Stanford University recently showcased their new Rovables robots, which are tiny devices that roam up and down a person’s clothing – and yes, that’s as the clothing is being worn.

The centimeter-sized robots hang on by pinching the fabric between their wheels, with the physically-unconnected wheel on the underside of the material held against the others simply by magnetic attraction.

Each Rovable contains a battery, microcontroller, and a wireless communications module that lets it track the movements and locations of its fellow little robots. It also has an inertial measurement unit (IMU), which includes a gyroscope and accelerometer. By using that IMU and by counting its wheel revolutions, the robot is able to keep track of its own location, allowing for limited autonomous navigation on the wearer’s body.

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Electronics that can be embedded in clothing are a growing trend. However, power sources remain a problem. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, scientists have now introduced thin, flexible, lithium ion batteries with self-healing properties that can be safely worn on the body. Even after completely breaking apart, the battery can grow back together without significant impact on its electrochemical properties.

Existing lithium ion batteries for wearable electronics can be bent and rolled up without any problems, but can break when they are twisted too far or accidentally stepped on — which can happen often when being worn. This damage not only causes the battery to fail, it can also cause a safety problem: Flammable, toxic, or corrosive gases or liquids may leak out.

A team led by Yonggang Wang and Huisheng Peng has now developed a new family of lithium ion batteries that can overcome such accidents thanks to their amazing self-healing powers. In order for a complicated object like a battery to be made self-healing, all of its individual components must also be self-healing. The scientists from Fudan University (Shanghai, China), the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (South Korea), and the Samsung R&D Institute China, have now been able to accomplish this.

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SEOUL Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Thursday it is acquiring U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) platform developer Viv Labs Inc, a firm run by a co-creator of Apple Inc’s Siri voice assistant program.

Samsung said in a statement it plans to integrate the San Jose-based company’s AI platform, called Viv, into the Galaxy smartphones and expand voice-assistant services to home appliances and wearable technology devices.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

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Though they’re touted as ideal for electronics, two-dimensional materials like graphene may be too flat and hard to stretch to serve in flexible, wearable devices. “Wavy” borophene might be better, according to Rice University scientists.

The Rice lab of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and experimental collaborators observed examples of naturally undulating, metallic , an atom-thick layer of boron, and suggested that transferring it onto an elastic surface would preserve the material’s stretchability along with its useful electronic properties.

Highly conductive graphene has promise for flexible electronics, Yakobson said, but it is too stiff for devices that also need to stretch, compress or even twist. But borophene deposited on a silver substrate develops nanoscale corrugations. Weakly bound to the silver, it could be moved to a flexible surface for use.

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In Brief.

Interscatter communication has enabled the first Wi-Fi communication between implanted devices, wearables, and smart devices.

Researchers from the University of Washington have created a new form of communication that allows devices like credit cards, smart contact lenses, brain implants, and smaller wearable electronics to use Wi-Fi to talk to everyday devices like watches and smartphones. It’s called “interscatter communication,” and it works by using reflections to convert Bluetooth signals into Wi-Fi transmissions in the air that can be picked up by smart devices.

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As useful as they are, wearable fitness trackers aren’t usually the height of fashion themselves, with many devices blending away out of sight on your wrist or ankle. Now Intel and Luxottica have teamed up to put a fitness tracker front and center on your face, stashing various biometric sensors and a voice-activated AI coach into a stylish, custom-designed pair of Oakley shades.

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As the saying goes, “If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself,” and it seems that you’ll soon be able to get a lot more done using artificially intelligent, high-tech exoskeleton Kindred. It’s the product of a startup created by quantum computing company D-Wave’s founder Geordie Rose, and according to the venture capital firm funding Kindred, the device “uses AI-driven robotics so that one human worker can do the work of four.”

Based on a patent application, the wearable system is envisioned as a 1.2-meter tall humanoid that may be covered with synthetic skin. It will include a head-mounted display and an exo-suit of sensors and actuators that carries out everyday tasks.

Essentially, it looks something like Spider-Man’s Doctor Octopus on the outside, but on the inside, Kindred utilizes quantum computation, a way of information processing and storage that is much faster and more powerful than that used by conventional computers. Data “learned” by the suit can be taught to other robots, allowing those robots to then perform the tasks autonomously.

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University of Houston researchers aim to leverage a new, noninvasive brain-machine interface system that taps into human brainwaves to control and command a wearable exoskeleton—a technology that could enable paraplegic kids to walk.

Kristopher Sturgis

Exoskeleton University of Houston

A new study out of the Laboratory for Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interface Systems at the University of Houston (UH) has paved the way for a new exoskeleton technology that will be unveiled at Cybathlon in Zurich — an event where the world’s most innovative prosthetic and assistive technologies are unveiled. Jeffrey Gorges, researcher at the university and lead research technician on the project, says that the powered wearable robot has application possibilities for patients of any age suffering from lower-limb paraplegia, but the focus is moving toward a system for children.

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Nice.

Crocus Technology, a leading developer of Tunneling Magnetoresistive Sensors (TMR) based on proprietary and patented Magnetic Logic Unit (MLU) technology, announces the availability of the CT51x digital switch, the first in a series of fully integrated digital sensors the company has launched. This family of devices accommodates a wide range of applications with larger air gaps, smaller magnetic fields, and significantly lower power consumption. The CT51x enables high-accuracy position detection, control and power switching functions with high sensitivity and reliability that system designers demand for the IoT, consumer and industrial applications.

“With ever increasing demand for intelligent sensing in smart products, the CT51x family of devices offers design-in flexibility and cost-savings for existing and emerging applications: IoT, wearables, appliances, smart meters, intelligent smart locks and other consumer products,” said Zack Deiri, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Crocus Technology. “The market is gravitating towards intelligent solid-state magnetic switches that provide higher reliability, faster frequency response, and extremely low power consumption for battery-powered applications in a smaller form factor, such as the CT51x.”

When used as a proximity switch, the CT51x can detect window or door movement in intrusion alarm systems and appliances. The digital switch can also activate wake-up and sleep modes in mobile devices such as laptops with lid open/closed detection with extremely low power consumption. The CT51x also measures rotation speed in battery-powered smart flow meters and can act as a safeguard against tampering in smart utility meters where annual losses surpass a billion dollars.

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