Future of shopping

Look at those production values and the sound design as one of the majors horns in.

Source: Posted by Bruce Sterling for Wired.

Look Ma, No Pen! Electrical Impulses Can Reproduce Handwriting

Someday, instead of typing your text message on a cramped iPhone keyboard, neuroscientist Michael Linderman says you’ll be scrawling your thoughts in the air.

Linderman and colleagues have figured out how to translate electrical impulses from muscles in the forearm and hand into written language. Using pattern-recognition algorithms and a technique called electromyography, the researchers can recognize and reproduce a person’s unique handwriting pattern from the movement of their hands. Eventually, they hope to create a fingerless glove equipped with electrode sensors that can automatically translate hand motions into digital or handwritten text. Read the rest of this entry »

Sleep Analysis at Home

If you’ve ever wondered how much sleep you actually got during a restless night, a new home-use device may have the answer. Users sleep wearing a headband fitted with a sensor that monitors electrical activity in the brain. Physicians use similar data gathered from EEGs to diagnose sleep disorders, but EEG studies are usually conducted in dedicated sleep clinics. In the home device, the headband sends data wirelessly to a bedside unit resembling an alarm clock, which records and displays the user’s sleep patterns. The data can be uploaded to a website that allows users to track sleep statistics and gives suggestions for how to improve sleep.

Product: Zeo Personal Sleep Coach
Cost: $400
Source: MyZeo.com

$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC

Putting OLPC’s software on a USB drive gives old PCs a new lease on life.

The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.

“What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost,” says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. “It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.”
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Tiny, DIY Satellites Get NASA Boost

STANFORD, California — We’ve known that the DIY ethic is good for modding your Roomba or building a beer bong, but groups of college students have taken the movement to the next level: space.

Working on shoestring budgets and short timelines, duct tape and tape measures, CubeSat enthusiasts build 4-inch square satellites and then piggyback their dreams on bigger missions’ rockets. They do it dirty and cheap, but their results are competitive with their spendier counterparts.

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Another Genius Low-cost Solution: The Pie-pan Surgical Lamp

Let’s say you’re in surgery, having a life-saving operation, and the power cuts out. Then imagine it stays out for a few hours, days, or even weeks—a not-infrequent occurrence in countries with crappy infrastructure. A team of engineering graduate and undergraduate students at University of Michigan has a great idea: A surgical lamp for use in developing countries where the power-grid’s unreliability poses serious threats to doctors’ abilities to properly treat patients.

The hook? It’s cheap to make (pie pan, bike brake, LED), and runs on batteries. And since it was designed by engineering folk, it actually works really well, and meets western-grade standards of reliability. It’s currently being tried out in Uganda.

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Wanting a private conversation? Deploy the “cone of silence”

‘Cone of silence’ keeps conversations secret

IN Get Smart, the 1960s TV spy comedy, secret agents wanting a private conversation would deploy the “cone of silence“, a clear plastic contraption lowered over the agents’ heads. It never worked – they couldn’t hear each other, while eavesdroppers could pick up every word. Now a modern cone of silence that we are assured will work is being patented by engineers Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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An Implantable Heart-Attack Monitor

A pacemaker-like device aims to get victims to the hospital faster.

An implantable device that alerts high-risk patients when they show signs of a heart attack could shorten the time it takes for the wearer to seek medical attention. The device, being developed by AngelMed, a medical-devices company in Shrewsbury, NJ, is already approved for use in Brazil and is now undergoing clinical testing in the United States. While early tests show that it can detect heart attacks, the impact on a patient’s long-term outcome is not yet clear: tests of other cardiac devices have found that detecting problems earlier doesn’t always translate into better health for patients.

Heart alert: An implantable device, shown left, measures a heart’s electrical activity. The device transmits information to an external device (the black box with cable), which tells the patient if he needs to visit the emergency room. This device transmits data to the physician’s workstation (the white box with screen), which tells the doctor what happened during the attack.
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Segway is trying to reinvent urban transportation with Rickshaw!

GM and Segway Develop Rickshaw Prototype

GM and Segway have teamed up to develop a new prototype vehicle as part of their efforts to “reinvent the automobile,” the companies say, but it’s not clear that their new vehicle will do better than the original Segway personal transport. 

Unlike the original self-balancing two-wheeler, the new vehicle will be enclosed and designed to transport two people seated side by side, rather than one person standing up. It will also be equipped with GPS, wireless technology, and sensors, which could eventually allow an onboard computer to take over some driving tasks.

Watch Video >>

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Wireless charging : Adaptor die

A new push is under way to let mobile devices off the leash by doing away with their dependence on power cables.

IF THE father of electromagnetism, Michael Faraday, could be transported into the 21st century, he would no doubt be awestruck by the iPhone. After five hours of tapping its touch-screen to browse the internet, make calls, play games and determine his location via satellite-positioning, he might also find himself a little puzzled. Why, with all the advances in technology and communications, would such a sophisticated device still need to be plugged in to be recharged? If phone calls and web pages can be beamed through the air to portable devices, then why not electrical power, too? It is a question many consumers and device manufacturers have been asking themselves for some time—and one that both new and established technology companies are now hoping to answer.

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3-D Webcam

Online video chat has gone 3-D. A new webcam with two cameras spaced approximately as far apart as human eyes sends two offset images to a computer. In real time, software processes the images according to how they’ll be viewed: the camera comes with five sets of blue-red 3-D glasses for use with ordinary monitors, but the software can also output images in the format used by new 3-D displays. The webcam is compatible with such applications as Skype, AOL Instant Messenger, and YouTube.

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Smart Pen Records Your Writing, Voice

The Livescribe Pulse pen amazes everyone I’ve shown it to: Writing on special paper, it records every stroke you make on the page. It can also record the audio you hear, synchronizing the audio track with everything you write.

Get the Pulse smartpen today

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