Lifeboat Foundation

Neuralink’s invasive brain implant vs phantom neuro’s minimally invasive muscle implant. Deep dive on brain computer interfaces, Phantom Neuro, and the future of repairing missing functions.

Connor glass.
Phantom is creating a human-machine interfacing system for lifelike control of technology. We are currently hiring skilled and forward-thinking electrical, mechanical, UI, AR/VR, and Ai/ML engineers. Looking to get in touch with us? Send us an email at [email protected].

Continue reading “Building NeuroTech Minimally Invasive Human Machine Interfaces | Dr. Connor Glass” »

From wearable gadgets to battery separators, the future of sustainable tech is starting to look like a mushroom. A team of researchers from the Institute of Experimental Physics in Linz have completed a proof-of-concept study, testing whether mycelium skin could substitute plastic in the production of soft electronics. The scientists used processed skin from the mushroom Ganoderma Lucidum – a saprophytic fungus native to some parts of Europe and China that grows naturally on dead hardwood.

This works by laying electronic components on the fungal skin through a process called physical vapor deposition, used to produce thin materials. The resulting electronic circuit has high thermal stability and can withstand thousands of bending cycles. The researchers say that combining conventional electronics with the biodegradable material could help reduce waste in the production of wearable electronics and sustainable battery separators, among other uses.

Continue reading “What if We Could Make Electronics From Mushrooms? | Mashable” »

Wearable technology is capable of tracking various measures of human health and is getting better all the time. New research shows how this could come to mean real-time feedback on posture and body mechanics. A research team at Cornell University has demonstrated this functionality in a novel camera system for the wrist, which it hopes to work into smartwatches of the future.

The system is dubbed BodyTrak and comes from the same lab behind a face-tracking wearable we looked at earlier in the year that is able to recreate facial expressions on a digital avatar through sonar. This time around, the group made use of a tiny dime-sized RGB camera and a customized AI to construct models of the entire body.

The camera is worn on the wrist and relays basic images of body parts in motion to a deep neural network, which had been trained to turn these snippets into virtual recreations of the body. This works in real time and fills in the blanks left by the camera’s images to construct 3D models of the body in 14 different poses.

From wearable electronics to microscopic sensors to telemedicine, new advances like graphene and supercapacitors are already here.

Solar cells that are stretchable, flexible and wearable won the day and the best poster award from a pool of 215 at Research Expo 2016 April 14 at the University of California San Diego. The winning nanoengineering researchers aim to manufacture small, flexible devices that can power watches, LEDs and wearable sensors. The ultimate goal is to design and build much bigger flexible solar cells that could be used as power sources and shelter in natural disasters and other emergencies.

Research Expo is an annual showcase of top graduate research projects for the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. During the poster session, graduate students are judged on the quality of their work and how well they articulate the significance of their research to society. Judges from industry, who often are alumni, pick the winners for each department. A group of faculty judges picks the overall winner from the six department winners.

Continue reading “Stretchable, Flexible, Wearable Solar Cells Take Top Prize at Research Expo 2016” »

Wearable heaters are highly desirable for low-temperature environments. However, the fundamental challenge in achieving such devices is to design electric-heating membranes with flexible, breathable, and stretchable properties.

Study: Large-Scale Preparation of Micro–Nanofibrous and Fluffy Propylene-Based Elastomer/ [email protected] Nanoplatelet Membranes with Breathable and Flexible Characteristics for Wearable Stretchy Heaters. Image Credit: s_maria/Shutterstock.com.

A study published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces aimed to achieve an electric heating membrane with a nanofibrous fluffy texture and excellent electric-heating features. Here, an electric heating membrane was fabricated by coating a melt-blown propylene-based elastomer (PBE) with polyurethane (PU) and graphene nanoplatelet films via an easy, cost-effective, and large-scale method involving a coating-compression cyclic process.

Personal computing has gotten smaller and more intimate over the years—from the desktop computer to the laptop, to smartphones and tablets, to smart watches and smart glasses.

But the next generation of wearable computing technology—for health and wellness, social interaction and myriad other applications—will be even closer to the wearer than a watch or glasses: It will be affixed to the skin.

Continue reading “New ‘smart tattoos’ tackle tech challenges of on-skin computing” »

Over the last three decades, the digital world that we access through smartphones and computers has grown so rich and detailed that much of our physical world has a corresponding life in this digital reality. Today, the physical and digital realities are on a steady course to merging, as robots, Augmented Reality (AR) and wearable digital devices enter our physical world, and physical items get their digital twin computer representations in the digital world.

These digital twins can be uniquely identified and protected from manipulation thanks to crypto technologies like blockchains. The trust that these technologies provide is extremely powerful, helping to fight counterfeiting, increase supply chain transparency, and enable the circular economy. However, a weak point is that there is no versatile and generally applicable identifier of physical items that is as trustworthy as a blockchain. This breaks the connection between the physical and digital twins and therefore limits the potential of technical solutions.

In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications, an interdisciplinary team of scientists led by Professors Jan Lagerwall (physics) and Holger Voos (robotics) from the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, and Prof. Mathew Schwartz (architecture, construction of the built environment) from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, U.S., propose an innovative solution to this problem where physical items are given unique and unclonable fingerprints realized using cholesteric spherical reflectors, or CSRs for short.

The study is in the early phase but promising.

We use body sprays to get rid of mosquitos most of the time. We can even use herbs such as sage and rosemary to keep them out of our homes. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg scientists have created a novel method of delivering insect repellent (MLU). The results were published in the.

The researchers used “IR3535,” an insect repellent created by MERCK, to create their prototypes.

Continue reading “This 3D-printed wearable mosquito repellent could finally end re-applying sprays” »