Optimising Your Indoor Environment

Author Image

by  turbo

BeagleA new environmental sensing system will soon be able to inform you on ways to enhance your indoor environment. Canadian startup Beagle Sense has just recently introduced the Beagle sensor system that promises to monitor only those atmospheric parameters that are required. The sensors achieve this by each sensing unit only monitoring one metric of either temperature level, sound, light, air pressure, air quality or humidity, allowing specific sensing units to be positioned only where they are called for. To install the equipment in the home, new owners just need to plug in their base station and link it to a Wi-Fi network as well as a mobile device for maximum functionality. When positioned about the house, they start relaying their sensor data back to the base station for owners to observe using a web or mobile app. The Beagle sensors are each powered by 2 AAA batteries and communicate with the base station using Bluetooth although they also have the ability to save up to 2 weeks of measurements using their own internal memory allowing them to be relocated out of range of the base station for a while before synchronising with it once back in range.

Read More

Robot Deliveries

Author Image

by  turbo

starshipSkype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla are leaving their offices and moving into the streets with their latest venture, Starship Technologies, which they hope will transform how goods are transported to consumers. Instead of the omnipresent man-and-a-delivery-van, they hope to be operating fleets of self-driving distribution robots that will take over delivery in the ‘last mile’. The notorious ‘last mile’ is known to be the most inefficient component of shipments in today’s delivery-focused society, especially in cities where the last few kilometres often takes up most of the total shipping cost. With setups in London and Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, the company is testing a wheeled robot that it expects to be cheaper and faster, and also more eco-friendly than the traditional man-and-a van delivery method. Each wheeled robot is built from off-the-shelf electronics, including an array of sensors to allow it to travel alongside pedestrians on regular pavements. Although the robots will be equipped with collision evasion as well as navigation software and are planned to run independently the majority of the time, they will also be able to be controlled by a human operator for safety reasons and to ensure that the deliveries are successful. The robots will have the capacity of a small car boot in which to carry items which will be locked inside the robot and openable only by the receiver. For the plan to be successful, deliveries will still be moved in bulk by current human methods to regional centres before being turned over to the robots for the final step. As they travel around, the robots will be monitored by the controllers and also accessible by the delivery recipients using an app.  Currently, the company is in the testing phase but expects initial trial services to begin operating in several countries in 2016.

Read More

The Gest-ure Controller

Author Image

by  turbo

GestApotact Labs has recently revealed a four-fingered ‘glove’ called Gest that is designed to allow users to control any attached computer or mobile device using just their hand gestures. The Gest controller is fashioned to accommodate any shape or size of hand by means of a flexible palm strap and 4 adjustable finger attachments. Each glove has 15 sensors including accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, which are commonly found in mobile devices. The specially-designed software makes the device very sensitive even to small finger motions and is designed to get to know just how each user moves his or her hands by producing a customized configuration distinct to each user. By adjusting the software program to each individual, the device is able to provide a very high degree of precision for all types of hand movements, even small finger twitches. The company has indicated that its first application will be for Adobe Photoshop with initial devices exhibiting 5 standard motions. For instance, pointing at the computer display permits you to position the computer’s mouse anywhere on the screen, while turning your hand readjusts Photoshop’s sliders, and 3D objects can be revolved by ‘grabbing and rotating them’. The device hooks up to just about any device that has Bluetooth, and is recharged with a Micro-USB interface. Apotact Labs also demonstrated the Gest controller working as a keyboard interface, but users will have to wait for this feature as it is still only in the experimental stage. Gest was just launched on Kickstarter and is expected to be delivered to early enthusiasts by late 2016.

Read More

Oral Insulin for Diabetes Sufferers

Author Image

by  turbo

Many people unfortunate enough to have diabetes also have to suffer the negative consequences of having to have insulin shots every day. Yet this could be about to change with a new insulin strip that is being developed that affixes to the intestinal tract wall surface and discharges its hormone after being ingested. Orally-administered insulin is nothing new but it has always been difficult to achieve in practice due to its susceptibility to digestive system enzymes that degrade the hormone before sufficient amounts of it have been absorbed. Yet researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have produced an insulin-loaded strip which would be transported through the body within a protecting polymer shell. By putting the patch incorporating insulin and an intestinal wall-permeation enhancer inside a stomach acid-resistant coated pill, the scientists developed a tablet that dissolves once in the right location within the intestinal tract allowing the insulin strip to affix itself to the intestinal wall prior to delivering the drug. The scientists experimented with rat and swine intestinal tracts to analyse both the ‘sticking’ power of the strip and the efficiency of delivery of its contents, with the most optimal concentrations of the permeation enhancer and drug combination able to trigger blood glucose levels to drop to about 70 percent of normal levels. If human trials of the insulin strip prove as effective, it will be very good news indeed for diabetes-suffers everywhere.

Read More

Have a Heart

Author Image

by  turbo

A scientific team at Carnegie Mellon University has just unveiled a 3D-bioprinting set-up that can be employed to generate soft interior body organs. Up until now, 3D-bioprinting has, for the most part, involved using components that supply their own structural support through their own intrinsic rigidity, for example, replacement bone structures that are made out of titanium.  But when dealing with trying to replicate soft organs in the body, a structural problem arises during printing in that subsequent layers do not have the required underpinning support from previous layers. The Carnegie Mellon University group led by Adam Feinberg have shown that bioprinting of soft tissues like hearts can be done using a method referred to as Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels or FRESH. The technique, involves printing the gel that will make the walls of the soft tissue completely within the confines of a second supporting gel allowing the soft-tissue organ to be synthesised. As with other bioprinters, the teams’s new 3D-bioprinter precisely injects layers of a tissue-building gel inside the supporting one to create the required shape. Then, much like quick-dissolving support filaments that are used to support gravity-defying structures within other 3D-printed designs, the support gel can be dissolved in 37C water, leaving behind the bioprinted organ ready for implantation into the patient. Donor organ transplants could very well soon be a distant memory.

Read More