A shirt that monitors your blood pressure or a pair of socks that can keep track of your cholesterol levels might be just a few years away from becoming reality.
In an article published in Applied Physics Reviews, researchers examine the use of microfibers, and even smaller nanofibers, as wearable monitors that could keep track of a patient’s vital signs.
The microfiber- and nanofiber-based technology addresses growing concerns in the medical community about monitoring chronic illnesses like diabetes, asthma, obesity, and high blood pressure as the population ages.
Scientists have created an ultrathin, flexible film that can emit laser light — and successfully tested it on a contact lens, demonstrating the possibility of laser eye-beams.
Before you rush out and buy a Cyclops-style visor, it’s not even close to powerful enough to cause damage. Instead, the researchers say, the technology has potential for use as wearable security tags, or even as a type of laser barcode.
The membranes containing the material are less than a thousandth of a millimetre thick, and flexible, which means they can easily be stuck to, or embedded into, polymer banknotes, or the soft plastics used for flexible contact lenses.
Peter and Dan discuss transformations in healthcare as a result of the pandemic and consequent stay-at-home orders. Peter envisions a future wherein people don’t go to the hospital when they get sick, but instead have a hospital at their fingertips thanks to sensors, wearables, and an abundance of personalized medical data.
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AI, Genetics, and Health-Tech / Wearables — 21st Century Technologies For Healthy Companion Animals.
Ira Pastor ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Angela Hughes, the Global Scientific Advocacy Relations Senior Manager and Veterinary Geneticist at Mars Petcare.
The global petcare industry is significantly expanding, with North America sales alone expected to hit US $300 billion by 2025. And while we may associate the Mars Corporation, the world’s largest candy company, with leading confectionary brands like Milky Way, M&M’s, Skittles, Snickers, Twix, etc. They also happen to be one of the world’s largest companies in pet care as well.
Dr. Angela Hughes, is the Global Scientific Advocacy Relations Senior Manager & Veterinary Geneticist at Mars Petcare. Dr. Hughes is both Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, and a PhD with a focus in Canine Genetics, both from the University of California, Davis. Dr. Hughes also serves as Veterinary Genetics Research Manager of Wisdom Health, a business unit of Mars Petcare, which has developed state-of-the-art genetic tests for companion animals, leading to revolutionary personalized petcare. She also serves as a Veterinary Geneticist of Hughes Veterinary Consulting, focused on small animal and equine genetics and with a special interest in small animal reproduction and pediatrics.
Dr Hughes is published in multiple academic journals, including the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association and has contributed chapters for publication in Veterinary Clinics of North America Small Animal Practice: Pediatrics and Large Animal Internal Medicine.
On this ideaXme episode we will hear from Dr. Hughes about:
-Her background — how she developed an interest in veterinary medicine and animal genetics, and how she arrived at Mars Petcare.
-Her role as the senior manager of Global Scientific Advocacy Relations at Mars Petcare.
Recent technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly compact and flexible devices. This includes wearable or portable technology, such as smart watches, earphones or other smart accessories, which can assist human users in a variety of ways.
Researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have recently devised a strategy that could enable the fabrication of portable, compact and flexible electrocaloric cooling devices. This strategy, outlined in a paper published in Nature Energy, is based on a four-layer cascade mechanism that enables a significant temperature lift in a user’s surroundings.
“Our research started more than five years ago, when we were funded by ARPA-E, an agency of the U.S. department of energy, to solve a key cooling need: to maintain sufficient personal thermal comfort while reducing the HVAC energy consumption for offices and buildings,” Qibing Pei, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Our key goal was to create a wearable cooler.”
With lithium-containing batteries facing constraints on many of the metals they contain, Nina Notman looks at whether its group 1 neighbour sodium can supply the answer.
The lithium-ion battery powers much of our modern lives, a fact reflected in this year’s Nobel prize. It resides in devices ranging from very small wearable electronics, through mobile phones and laptops, to electric vehicles and ‘the world’s biggest battery’ – the huge 100MW/129MWh Tesla battery installed on an Australian wind farm in 2017.
‘Lithium-ion has a massive span of applications,’ explains Jonathan Knott, an energy storage researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia. ‘It is being used as a hammer to crack every nut and we need to start getting a little bit more sophisticated in the use of the best tool for the job.’
The quiet shift in strategy, which brings the Vision Fund’s approach closer to that of a traditional venture capital investor, may ease concerns over big, bold bets going sour, a factor that has left a major gap between SoftBank’s market capitalization and the sum of its investments.
TOKYO — SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund is turning to a new strategy as a global pandemic and government stimulus distort tech valuations: Invest smaller in hopes for bigger returns.
After raising nearly $100 billion and investing $85 billion in high-profile companies like Uber Technologies, WeWork and ByteDance over three years, the Vision Fund is now focusing on making smaller bets in early-stage startups.
Among the investments it has led are $100 million in Zhangmen, a Chinese online education startup; $150 million in Unacademy, an Indian peer; and $100 million in Biofourmis, a U.S. startup that tracks health data using wearable devices. In total, it has approved 19 investments worth $3.5 billion for “Vision Fund 2” — a vehicle currently funded entirely by SoftBank.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are developing a wearable electronic device that’s “really wearable”—a stretchy and fully-recyclable circuit board that’s inspired by, and sticks onto, human skin.
The team, led by Jianliang Xiao and Wei Zhang, describes its new “electronic skin” in a paper published today in the journal Science Advances. The device can heal itself, much like real skin. It also reliably performs a range of sensory tasks, from measuring the body temperature of users to tracking their daily step counts.
And it’s reconfigurable, meaning that the device can be shaped to fit anywhere on your body.
Real-time health monitoring and sensing abilities of robots require soft electronics, but a challenge of using such materials lie in their reliability. Unlike rigid devices, being elastic and pliable makes their performance less repeatable. The variation in reliability is known as hysteresis.
Guided by the theory of contact mechanics, a team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) came up with a new sensor material that has significantly less hysteresis. This ability enables more accurate wearable health technology and robotic sensing.
The research team, led by Assistant Professor Benjamin Tee from the Institute for Health Innovation & Technology at NUS, published their results in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 28 September 2020.
Swiss researchers are getting excited about a polymer that could allow them to incorporate a “flexible solar concentrator” in textile fibres, making it possible to charge personal electronic devices from the clothes their owners wear.
