Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers has developed a flexible, rechargeable silver oxide-zinc battery with a five to 10 times greater areal energy density than state of the art. The battery also is easier to manufacture; while most flexible batteries need to be manufactured in sterile conditions, under vacuum, this one can be screen printed in normal lab conditions. The device can be used in flexible, stretchable electronics for wearables as well as soft robotics.

The team, made up of researchers at the University of California San Diego and California-based company ZPower, details their findings in the Dec. 7 issue of the journal Joule.

“Our batteries can be designed around electronics, instead of electronics needed to be designed around batteries,” said Lu Yin, one of the paper’s co-first authors and a Ph.D. student in the research group of UC San Diego’s nanoengineering Professor Joseph Wang.

Drexel University researchers are one step closer to offering a new treatment for the millions of patients who suffer from slow-healing, chronic wounds. The battery-powered applicator — as small and light as a watch — is the first portable and potentially wearable device to heal wounds with low-frequency ultrasound.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the research team an estimated $3 million to test the therapy on 120 patients over the next five years. By using diagnostic monitoring of blood flow in the wound tissue, the clinical trial will also determine how nutrition and inflammation impact wound closure, making treatment customization a possibility.

Continue reading “NIH Funds Clinical Trial to Test Device That Heals Wounds With Ultrasound” »

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.

Circa 2018

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.

Continue reading “Finally, a Contact Lens That Actually Beams Lasers From Your Eyes” »

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.

Continue reading “Mars Personalised Petcare: High Tech, Genetics and Wearables” »

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.

Continue reading “SoftBank eyes smaller bets, bigger returns in Vision Fund rethink” »