Wearables

  Over a two-year period, researchers went through about 50 bass, puncturing or fracturing hundreds of fish scales under the microscope, to try to understand their properties and mechanics better.

This article is part of a two part series by Jaya Kathuria and Anbarasu Samiappan. In Part 1 they discussed several design challenges of wearable product design, including always-ON applications and power implications, analogue front-end and sensor integration, board or system real estate, sleek user interface through gestures, and privacy and secure communications.

The design requirements for modern wearable products include sleek design, embedded intelligence, energy efficiency, expandability and cost-effectiveness. These create many design challenges for manufactures of these types of devices. The pressure from never-ending improvement forces designers to look for ways to integrate more functionality into a single chip to simplify design.

With the support of Robotae, a robotics and mechatronics consultancy, Motion Metrics has developed Carv – the world’s first digital ski coach that uses a smart boot insert to capture motion and pressure.

Following on from Apple’s removal of the 3.5mm headphone socket in its latest iPhone, the market for wireless earphones looks set to grow in 2017. Many models were exhibited at CES 2017 and among the nearly 4,000 exhibitors vying for attention was Manchester-based start-up Mymanu. 

Emerging technology is giving hope for the handicapped, and harnessing brainwaves for the physically disabled and helping the visually impaired with "artificial vision" are just the start. Many systems showcased at the CES in Las Vegas are aimed at improving quality of life for people with disabilities. BrainRobotics, a Massachusetts-based startup, showed its prosthesis that can be controlled by residual muscle strength of an amputee wi...

Mobile payments may go mainstream on wearable devices like smartwatches by taking advantage of a ready-to-use payment solution containing technology from STMicroelectronics. ST, G&D, and FitPay have used ST's security chip to jointly create the first secure hardware and software solution that is pre-approved for use by device manufacturers with the aim to develop integrated tokenised payments from Mastercard or Visa.

The healthcare industry forecasts that future wellbeing will be monitored by wearable, wirelessly networked sensors. Manufacturing such devices could become much easier using decal electronics. A KAUST-developed process prints these high-performance, silicon-based computers on soft, sticker-like surfaces that can be attached anywhere. Fitting electronics on to the asymmetric contours of human bodies demands a re-think of traditional computer...

Tattoos aren't just for body art. They can have medical applications, too. Doctors are using them on patients to mark an area for future treatment - particularly for non-melanoma skin cancer such as basal cell carcinoma - but the inks can cause problems. Now scientists have developed a better solution. In the journal ACS Nano, they report an ink that glows only under certain light conditions and can disappear altogether after a period of time.

  BodyCap announces that two of its wearable health monitoring devices are currently being used by European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet aboard the International Space Station (ISS), as part of ESA’s EveryWear program, an ambulatory data collection system.