Lifeboat Foundation

Albert Einstein famously postulated that “the only real valuable thing is intuition,” arguably one of the most important keys to understanding intention and communication.

But intuitiveness is hard to teach—especially to a machine. Looking to improve this, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up with a method that dials us closer to more seamless human–robot collaboration. The system, called “Conduct-A-Bot,” uses human muscle signals from wearable sensors to pilot a robot’s movement.

Continue reading “Conduct-A-Bot system uses muscle signals to enable more natural human-robot communication” »

Existing electronic skin (e-skin) sensing platforms are equipped to monitor physical parameters using power from batteries or near-field communication. For e-skins to be applied in the next generation of robotics and medical devices, they must operate wirelessly and be self-powered. However, despite recent efforts to harvest energy from the human body, self-powered e-skin with the ability to perform biosensing with Bluetooth communication are limited because of the lack of a continuous energy source and limited power efficiency. Here, we report a flexible and fully perspiration-powered integrated electronic skin (PPES) for multiplexed metabolic sensing in situ. The battery-free e-skin contains multimodal sensors and highly efficient lactate biofuel cells that use a unique integration of zero- to three-dimensional nanomaterials to achieve high power intensity and long-term stability. The PPES delivered a record-breaking power density of 3.5 milliwatt·centimeter⁻² for biofuel cells in untreated human body fluids (human sweat) and displayed a very stable performance during a 60-hour continuous operation. It selectively monitored key metabolic analytes (e.g., urea, NH₄⁺, glucose, and pH) and the skin temperature during prolonged physical activities and wirelessly transmitted the data to the user interface using Bluetooth. The PPES was also able to monitor muscle contraction and work as a human-machine interface for human-prosthesis walking.

Recent advances in robotics have enabled soft electronic devices at different scales with excellent biocompatibility and mechanical properties; these advances have rendered novel robotic functionalities suitable for various medical applications, such as diagnosis and drug delivery, soft surgery tools, human-machine interaction (HMI), wearable computing, health monitoring, assistive robotics, and prosthesis (1–6). Electronic skin (e-skin) can have similar characteristics to human skin, such as mechanical durability and stretchability and the ability to measure various sensations such as temperature and pressure (7–11). Moreover, e-skin can be augmented with capabilities beyond those of the normal human skin by incorporating advanced bioelectronics materials and devices.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a small-business innovation research (SBIR) solicitation (HR001120S0019-05) for the Wearable Laser Detection and Alert System.

DARPA researchers want to understand the feasibility of a wearable laser sensor that can detect laser irradiation rapidly during the day and at night and alert the wearer in real-time of lasing.

DARPA wants a wearable laser-detection system with low size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP) that would act as a stand-alone sensor to detect laser illumination over the 450-to-1600-nanometer visible to shortwave infrared region.

For transhumanists, the possibilities of human interconnectivity via technology is only the beginning of how people may eventually transcend the limitations of their bodies. Photographer David Vintiner and art director Gem Fletcher set out to meet the innovators, artists, and dreamers within the transhumanism movement who are pushing the boundaries of their biology to become something more than human. Their project I Want to Believe consists of three chapters — the first touching on wearable technology, the second on individuals who have made permanent changes to their bodies, and the last on how some transhumanists plan to transcend the human condition.

“Science and human advancement has always been propelled forward by the people who do things differently and those who are not afraid to break the rules.”

By Gabriel H. Sanchez

Continue reading “15 Pictures From The Future Of Human Evolution” »

#Technology in #medicine: What will the #future #healthcare be like? https://www.neurozo-innovation.com/post/future-health Technologies have made many great impacts on our medical system in recent years. The article will first give a thorough summarization of them, and then the expectations and potential problems regarding future healthcare will be discussed. #AI #5G #VR #AR #MR #3DPrinting #BrainComputerInterface #telemedicine #nanotechnology #drones #SelfDriving #blockchain #robotics #innovation #trend

Technology has many beneficial effects on modern people’s lives, and one of them is to prolong our lifespan through advancing the medical field. In the past few years, new techniques such as artificial intelligence, robots, wearable tech, and so on have been used to improve the quality of our healthcare system, and some even newer innovations such as flying vehicles and brain computer interface are also considered valuable to the field. In this article, we will first give a thorough discussion about how these new technologies will shape our future healthcare, and then some upcoming problems that we may soon face will be addressed.

DAEGU, South Korea, April 6, 2020 — Luminescence technology developed at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), using an in-plane electric field generated in parallel to the light-emitting layer of an LED, could help improve the efficiency of light-emitting elements used in billboards and banners. According to the research team, the LEDs produced this way emit light in a more flexible, stable way than conventional LEDs.

Bulky, buzzing and beeping hospital rooms demonstrate that monitoring a patient’s health status is an invasive and uncomfortable process, at best, and a dangerous process, at worst. Penn State researchers want to change that and make biosensors that could make health monitoring less bulky, more accurate—and much safer.

The key would be making sensors that are so stretchable and flexible that they can easily integrate with the human body’s complex, changing contours, said Larry Cheng, the Dorothy Quiggle Professor in Engineering and an affiliate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. His lab is making progress on designing sensors that can do just that.

If biosensors that are both energy efficient and stretchable can be achieved at scale, the researchers suggest that engineers can pursue—and, in some cases, are already pursuing—a range of options for sensors that can be worn on the body, or even placed inside the body. The payoff would be smarter, more effective and more personalized medical treatment and improved health decision-making—without a lot of bulky, buzzing and beeping pieces of monitoring equipment.

Researchers at Duke University and Michigan State University have engineered a novel type of supercapacitor that remains fully functional even when stretched to eight times its original size. It does not exhibit any wear and tear from being stretched repeatedly and loses only a few percentage points of energy performance after 10,000 cycles of charging and discharging.

The researchers envision the supercapacitor being part of a power-independent, stretchable, flexible electronic system for applications such as wearable electronics or biomedical devices.

The results appear online March 19 in Matter, a journal from Cell Press. The research team includes senior author Changyong Cao, assistant professor of packaging, mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University (MSU), and senior author Jeff Glass, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke. Their co-authors are doctoral students Yihao Zhou and Qiwei Han and research scientist Charles Parker from Duke, as well as Ph.D. student Yunteng Cao from the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology.

This inflatable wristband could save your life in deep waters.