Tag Archives: wearable

Can innovative wearable technology enhance mental health?

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“I achieved 40 seconds of uninterrupted concentration.”

Apparently, this is cause for celebration. For the past 10 minutes, I've been staring at my phone, trying to move a digital ball up a hill using only the power of my mind. The Mendi headset I wear analyzes my brain activity and reflects it in my games. The more you concentrate, the higher the ball will rise.

This exercise is thought to work your mental muscles, just like using weights to train your physical muscles, ultimately increasing your focus and reducing stress.

Like thousands of other people, I've been wearing smartwatches for years to help me track my fitness and improve my physical health. But the wearables industry has set its sights on a new target: mental health. We now have smart watches and brainwave-reading devices that not only analyze the state of our nervous systems, but perhaps intervene proactively to improve our well-being, and we now have mental health support. We're making it more accessible and wearable than ever before. “We're harnessing the brain's ability to rewire itself so that we can have more control over our emotions,” he says. Mustafa Hamada Mendi Chief Product and Scientific Officer.

As someone who suffers from stress and anxiety, I'm willing to try anything that helps me control it. But I have a background in neuroscience, so I’m wary of believing the hype. So I took a closer look at the growing number of devices targeting concentration, concentration, stress and anxiety to find out how they work and which ones actually make a difference…

Source: www.newscientist.com

Review of Oura Gen 3: Will the Smart Ring Famous Celebrities and Athletes Wear Actually Benefit You?

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SSmart rings are gaining popularity, with Oura being spotted on the fingers of celebrities and elite athletes. It offers all the health-tracking features of a smartwatch in a smaller, less technical device focused on sleep, recovery, and resilience. Can the average person use it?

Now in its third generation, the Oura Gen 3 is the most popular smart ring on the market. It comes in various colors, metals, and sizes, resembling an attractive piece of jewelry, priced starting at £299 (€329/$299), plus a £6 monthly subscription. Following the trends of celebrities doesn’t come cheap.

The sleek titanium rings are available in different colors, finishes, and two shapes: flat top and fully circular. An inner layer of clear plastic reveals components, sensors, and contacts that read metrics like heart rate using three prongs touching the underside of your finger.

How does it feel to wear?

The smooth titanium finish shines in different light and is available in many other colors and finishes, including classic silver and gold. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Unlike other fitness trackers, Oura has no screen, sound, or visible alerts other than occasional lights from its sensors. All interactions happen through a smartphone app. Wearing it on the index finger is recommended for accurate data, but it can be cumbersome when using a smartphone.

The Oura ring, while twice as thick as a traditional wedding band, fits snugly but may be uncomfortable between fingers. It requires careful sizing and removal for regular cleaning and charging.

Oura has a consistent thickness all around, so it fits snugly against adjacent fingers better than other larger rings. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Sleep, sleep, and more sleep

The Oura app syncs data and settings via Bluetooth and displays the information in an easy-to-understand way. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Oura emphasizes thorough sleep analysis and daily recovery. It offers suggestions for improving health long-term. During the day, it tracks activity, compiles an Activity Score from steps, calories, heart rate, and stress levels. It also recognizes activities like walking and cycling.

At night, the ring tracks sleep efficiency, cycles, heart rate, variability, and blood oxygen to calculate a sleep score. It provides trend analysis and insights on readiness and resilience based on biometric data.

The app displays health data clearly with graphs and reports, offering suggestions for improvement. It also includes women’s health tracking, fertility insights, and partnered apps for extended functionality.

Sustainability

Oura will eventually become disposable, as the batteries in the ring will wear out, at which point they can’t be replaced. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The Oura Gen 3 is not repairable, and the battery is not replaceable. Sustainability features are lacking, with no recycled materials, environmental impact reports, or recycling programs available.

Price

Prices for the Oura Gen 3 start from £299 (€329/$299), with a range of designs and finishes. A one-month free trial is offered, with a monthly subscription at £5.99 (€5.99 / $5.99). Membership registration is required.

Compared to other similar products, the Oura ring is competitively priced but comes with additional subscription costs.

Verdict

The Oura ring 3 is an excellent option for those wanting to track sleep and overall health without a screen on their wrist. It offers comprehensive data analysis and insightful recommendations for health improvement.

Although the ring has some drawbacks, including cost, subscription fees, and tracking limitations, it provides valuable insights into health trends and data analysis.

Overall, the Oura ring offers a unique approach to health tracking with detailed data and user-friendly features, making it a compelling option for those prioritizing sleep and recovery.

Strong Points: Jewelry-like design, comprehensive sleep & health tracking, smart trend analysis & helpful advice, easy to understand, 5-day battery life, 100m water resistance, an effective health alternative to a smartwatch.

Cons: Expensive, monthly subscription, thick for a ring, limited tracking capabilities.

The Oura ring is packed with sensors and technology. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Source: www.theguardian.com

Wearable Sensors Target Heatstroke Detection for Worker Safety

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summary

  • Researchers are experimenting with biosensors that can monitor workers’ vital signs and provide warnings if they show signs of heatstroke.
  • The four-year study involves more than 150 farmworkers in Florida who have been wearing sensors in the fields.
  • Agricultural workers are 35 times more likely to die from heatstroke than other workers.

People who work outdoors are at greatest risk from extreme heat, which can be fatal within minutes, so researchers have begun experimenting with wearable sensors that can monitor workers’ vital signs and warn them if they are starting to show the early symptoms of heatstroke.

In Pearson, Florida, where temperatures can soar to nearly 90 degrees just before and after noon, workers on a fern farm wear experimental biopatches as part of a study sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency. National Institutes of HealthThe patch also measures a worker’s vital signs and skin hydration, and is equipped with a gyroscope to monitor continuous movement.

Scientists from Emory University and Georgia Tech are collecting data and feeding it into an artificial intelligence algorithm. The ultimate goal is for the AI to predict when workers are likely to suffer from heatstroke and send them a warning on their phone before that happens. But for now, the researchers are still analyzing the data and plan to publish a research paper next year.

“There’s a perception that field work is hot, and that’s the reality,” says Roxana Chicas, a nurse researcher at Emory University who has been overseeing Biopatch data collection. “I think with research and creativity, we can find ways to protect field workers.”

average 34 workers died of heatstroke According to the Environmental Protection Agency, farmworkers will be killed every year from 1992 to 2022. 35x odds Workers are more likely to die from heatstroke than other workers, but until now it has been left to states to decide how to protect workers from heatstroke. California, for example, requires employers to provide training, water, and shade when temperatures exceed 80 degrees Fahrenheit, but many states have no such rules.

Chicas and his team partnered with the Florida Farmworkers Association to recruit participants for the study, aiming to have 100 workers wear the biopatch over the four-year study, but were surprised by how many volunteered, ultimately enrolling 166.

Participating workers arrive at work before dawn, receive a patch, have their vital signs monitored, and then head out into the fields before the hottest, most dangerous parts of the day.

“We hope this study will help improve working conditions,” study participant Juan Pérez said in Spanish, adding that he has worked in the fern fields for 20 years and would like more breaks and higher wages.

Other farmworkers said they hoped the study would shed light on just how tough their jobs are.

Study participant Antonia Hernandez, who lives in Pearson, said she often worries about the heat hazards facing her and her daughter, who both work in fern fields.

“When you don’t have a family, the only thing you worry about is the house and the rent,” Hernandez said in Spanish. “But when you have children, the truth is, there’s a lot of pressure and you have to work.”

Chicas said he could see the heat-related fatigue showing on some of the workers’ faces.

“They look much older than their real age, some of them look much older than their real age, because it takes a toll on their body and their health,” she said.

Chikas has been researching ways to protect farmworkers from the heat for nearly a decade. In a project that began in 2015, workers were fitted with bulky sensors that measured skin temperature, skin hydration, blood oxygen levels, and vital signs. This latest study is the first to test a lightweight biopatch that looks like a large bandage and is placed in the center of the chest.

Overall, wearable sensors are much easier to use, and some are becoming more widely used. While the biosensors that Cikas’ team is experimenting with aren’t yet available to the public, a brand called SlateSafety sells a system (sponsored by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) that is available to employers. The system includes an armband that transmits measurements of a worker’s core temperature to a monitoring system. If the temperature is too high, the employer can notify the worker to take a break.

A similar technology, called the Heat Stroke Prevention System, is used in the military. Developed by the U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine, the system requires soldiers or Marines in a company to wear a chest strap that estimates core temperature, skin temperature and gait stability, allowing commanders to understand a soldier’s location and risk of heatstroke.

“The system is programmed to sense when a person is approaching higher than appropriate levels of heat exposure,” says Emma Atkinson, a biomedical researcher at the institute. stated in a news release “Our system allows us to provide warnings before heat stroke occurs, allowing us to intervene before someone collapses,” the report, released in February, added.

The system that Chicas and his team are developing differs from those systems in that it notifies workers directly, rather than in a larger system controlled by their employers. They haven’t finished collecting data from farmworkers yet, but the next step is for algorithms to start identifying patterns that might indicate risk of heatstroke.

“Outdoor workers need to spend time outdoors – otherwise food wouldn’t be harvested, ferns wouldn’t be cut, houses wouldn’t be built,” Chicas said. “With the growing threat of climate change, workers need something to better protect themselves.”

Source: www.nbcnews.com

The Future of Smart Textiles: Harnessing the Potential of Wearable Technology from the Human Body

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From T-shirts with changing messages to carpets that can detect your position, the future of smart textiles seems to come straight out of a sci-fi novel.

Researchers now claim they have created a smart fiber that can achieve just that, without the need for a battery pack.

A team of Chinese researchers have developed textile-based electronics that utilize the human body as part of a circuit to harness electromagnetic energy from the environment.

This innovation could pave the way for a “body-bound” fiber electronics technology that functions without electronic chips or batteries and could be applied in various scenarios.

Co-author Chengyi Hou from Donghua University in Shanghai explained, “When electromagnetic energy passes through a fiber, it is converted into different forms of energy, including visible light or radio waves. Therefore, the fiber not only emits light but also produces an electrical signal when in contact with the human body.”

Hou highlighted that these radio signals are programmable by manipulating different aspects of the system, such as the fiber’s contact area with the body and its diameter.

The team stated that this method resolves a major challenge in integrating electronic systems into textiles, which is the necessity of rigid components.

Hou mentioned, “We have successfully achieved mass production of this new type of fiber electronics, which is as thin and soft as traditional fibers. The next step is to implement it.”

The team has created prototypes like a wearable cloth display with a cloth keyboard, intended for individuals with hearing impairments to aid in communication, as well as textile controllers for gaming.

Additionally, they developed a wireless tactile carpet that illuminates underfoot, providing emergency lighting at night and wirelessly transmitting signals to control household devices like lights.

Researchers have created a carpet that can glow underfoot and transmit signals that can be used to control switches in appliances such as lights. Photo: Yang Weifeng

Read more about the study here. The team assures that the fiber is constructed from three layers of inexpensive materials, making it durable, washable, and sweat-resistant.

An accompanying article suggests that this technology can also be utilized in robots, robotic prosthetics, and capturing haptic information to enhance human interactions and object recognition.

Dr. Luigi Occhipinti, a research director at the University of Cambridge specializing in smart electronics, biosystems, and AI, acknowledged the potential of this approach.

He stated, “By being constantly surrounded by various electromagnetic fields, we are developing innovative electronic textiles with skin sensors and unconventional electronics, powered uniquely through energy harvesting. This has the potential to unlock a new realm of self-powered wearable electronics for continuous health monitoring.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

What impact will wearable AI have on the future of smartphones?

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Please try to imagine. I remember being on the bus or walking in the park and having an important task slip out of my mind. Maybe you were planning to send an email, catch up on a meeting, or have lunch with a friend. Without missing a beat, just say out loud what you forgot, and a small device strapped to your chest or placed on the bridge of your nose will send you a message, summarize a meeting, or remind a friend to go to lunch. Send invitations. No need to poke at your smartphone screen and the job is done.

This is the kind of utopian convenience that a growing wave of technology companies are trying to achieve through artificial intelligence. Generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT exploded in popularity last year as search engines like Google, messaging apps like Slack, and social media services like Snapchat raced to integrate the technology into their systems.

AI add-ons have become commonplace across apps and software, but as the first AI-powered consumer devices launch and compete for space with smartphones, the same generation technology is poised to enter the hardware realm.

One of the first people out of the gate was eye pin California startup Humane. It’s a wearable device that’s only slightly larger than a can of Vaseline and attaches to your shirt via a magnet. You can send texts, make calls, take photos, and play music. However, there is no app support and no screen. Instead, it uses a laser to project a simple interface onto your outstretched palm. The built-in AI chatbot can be instructed through voice commands to search the web or answer queries in much the same way you’d expect from ChatGPT.

“I plan to train Ai Pin to be my personal assistant to facilitate my writing and creative work,” said the Virginia-based company, which pre-ordered the device ahead of its initial U.S. launch in April, says Tiffany Jana, a consultant with Since she travels a lot, she thinks it would be nice to have a photographer and translator to accompany her. “I don’t have all the assistants and large teams that supported me in the past. I’ve always been a tech guy and enjoy ChatGPT.”

Meanwhile, Facebook’s parent company Meta has already Smart glasses equipped with AI Partnering with Ray-Ban and Chinese companies TCL and Oppo Companies followed suit with their own AI glasses. All of these have pretty much the same functionality as Ai Pin and are sold in a way that connects to an AI chatbot that responds to voice commands.

It’s a way to curb smartphone overuse by providing the same essential functionality without addictive apps.

If all of this sounds a lot like what your smartphone’s voice assistant or your living room’s Alexa already does, that’s because that’s essentially what it does. “Using AI in new devices is still the norm today,” says David Lindlbauer, an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. “Everyone uses Google Suggestions, Apple Siri to navigate their phones, or smart suggestions in apps on their phones.” The difference, he says, is that these new and upcoming devices will, which aims to embed AI capabilities in a “less obtrusive and more ubiquitous way.”

Its design intent is most evident in future products pendant From US startup Rewind and software developer Tab AI Avi Shiffman. These small devices hang around your neck and passively record everything you hear and say during the day, then transcribe the most important parts so you can read them back at your convenience later. Designed to summarize. These are essentially productivity tools that bundle the kinds of generative AI capabilities found elsewhere into standalone devices.

But why would you want a device that does more than what your smartphone already has? Partly to free yourself from the less-than-welcome elements. Humane is pitching Ai Pin as a way to curb smartphone overuse by offering the same important functionality without the addictive apps that make you scroll compulsively. “An alcoholic is not dependent on the bottle, but on the contents,” says Christian Montag, chair of molecular psychology at the University of Ulm in Germany, by analogy. He says social media platforms in particular are often interested in intentionally extending screen time in order to show more ads or collect personal data. say. Experiments show that when you use your smartphone in grayscale mode, Reduce user retentionremoving the screen completely can have even more severe effects.

While this may seem counterintuitive to the tech industry’s ever-increasing appetite for new features and gadgets, it’s probably not as alien as it first seems. “Many people wear headphones all day long,” says Lindlbauer. “Therefore, it is entirely possible to move away from the temptation of scrolling through doom and move towards technology that allows us to access the digital world constantly, but unobtrusively.”

However, discussions about their broader applications are beginning to take place. For some, the future of this technology lies not in how it can be integrated into existing platforms, but in whether it can fundamentally change the way platforms are accessed. “There will be no need to use different apps for different tasks,” former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates said in an article. Blog post outlining his vision. “Simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do.” Then, leave it to your device to figure out what apps, platforms, and information it needs to complete the task you set.

This is an idea that will be put into preliminary practice in the next stage. R1. Developed by Rabbit, a Californian AI startup, the R1 is a handheld device that looks a bit like a portable gaming console and operates like a powerful voice assistant. However, it is designed to interact directly with an app on your phone on your behalf, rather than simply connecting to an AI chatbot that generates passive responses to your commands (like other wearable gadgets). Masu. The idea is that R1 acts as an all-in-one interface for your device, a kind of central app that can control everything else.

“We’re not building products for new use cases. We’re developing better, more intuitive ways to address existing use cases.” said Jesse Lyu, Chief Executive Officer of Rabbit. He describes the R1 as a “digital companion” that doesn’t replace your smartphone, but makes it easier to use.

The value of that approach will become clear when R1 launches later this year. However, similar experimental devices are expected to follow. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, is reportedly already in talks with former Apple chief designer Jony Ive to explore hardware ideas. And a group of startups and Silicon Valley powerhouses are now racing to develop the chips and processors these new devices will need to power their AI models.

Whatever form these AI devices end up taking, they will be hard to compete with the globally connected, highly capable, and intuitively controlled glass rectangles that are in most of our pockets. You’re going to have to work. However, as ubiquitous as smartphones seem, they too have an expiration date. “Smartphones have only been with us for about 15 years,” says Lindlbauer. “I don’t want to believe that smartphones are the pinnacle of technology or that we’ll ever use them the way we do now. [another] 15 years.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

Innovative Wearable Device Identifies Early Signs of Breast Cancer

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The World Health Organization reported that in 2020, 2.3 million women worldwide were diagnosed with breast cancer. American Cancer Society states that early diagnosis of breast cancer leads to a 100% survival rate. During the initial diagnosis, images or scans of breast tissue are examined by the doctor to detect abnormalities.

Doctors commonly use ultrasound devices to diagnose breast cancer using sound waves. Ultrasound for diagnosing breast cancer. Scientists have identified limitations of ultrasound in the past, such as the need for proper skills and training, poor contact with skin during scanning, and maintenance challenges of large ultrasound machines in hospitals.

To address these limitations, a group of researchers developed a wearable, portable, and affordable device called cUSBr-Patch, which stands for Compatible Ultrasonic Chest Patch. To create this wearable patch, they used a 3D printer to design a honeycomb-shaped patch with holes that can be attached to a soft fabric bra.

Scientists attached a small scanning device to the patch that uses sound waves to acquire medical images similar to an ultrasound machine. This device, called phased array transducer, uses piezoelectric material and differs from traditional hospital ultrasound scanners, producing clear and high-resolution images.

The cUSBr-Patch is attached to a bra with magnets and allows the patch to directly touch the skin for scanning. A small tracker on the phased array transducer is moved and rotated using a handle to capture images of the entire breast.

Researchers tested cUSBr-Patch on female patients with breast abnormalities, scanning both breasts in six different locations using the phased array transducer connected to the patch. Computer programs were then used to generate images similar to those from standard hospital ultrasound machines.

The researchers concluded that cUSBr-Patch can detect breast cancer at a level comparable to traditional hospital ultrasound equipment. They are working on a smaller version of the device, aiming to make it accessible for home use by high-risk individuals and populations without regular testing facilities to improve breast cancer survival rates significantly.


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Source: sciworthy.com