'Intelligent clothing' could stop boats when fishermen fall overboard

Working as a commercial fisherman is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. There are numerous ways in which they can end up in the water, with their shipmates (if they even have any) not noticing until it’s too late. That, or their boat can simply sink. In any case, fishermen need all the help they can get when it comes to safety, so a 14-group research consortium is developing “intelligent clothing” for them to wear at sea.
The three-year, 4 million Euro (approx. US$5,225,000) Safe@Sea project is being coordinated by Norway’s SINTEF research group, with Norwegian textile manufacturer Helly Hansen Pro as project manager. Other groups taking part in the project come from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Italy and the UK.
European fishermen have already expressed their needs to Safe@Sea, and the group is now working on addressing them. One of the most noteworthy features of the workwear is a proposed built-in wireless “dead man’s handle.” This will detect when its wearer has fallen overboard, and automatically kill the boat’s engine and activate a locator beacon – an essential feature for fishermen who work alone. Such devices are already available, although they have to be manually attached to clothing, so they could be forgotten or just not used.
Once in the water, the clothing could double as a flotation device. This could either be through solid slabs of buoyant materials, or via “lungs” that automatically inflate when immersed.
Of course, it will all count for nothing if nobody wants to wear the stuff. To that end, the researchers are also working on making it impervious to staining from fish blood and guts, while at the same time trying to keep it soft and breathable. They are also looking into the possibility of self-repairing material that glues up small rips in itself, to make sure it remains watertight.
At this point it’s hard to say how much of the proposed technology will make it into the final product, but the research itself is still valuable. “If we don’t manage to develop such textiles in the course of this three-year project, we can at least hope to create a basis for other materials that will be of value in the future,” said SINTEF’s project coordinator Hilde Færevik.

Mobile phones charged by the power of speech

In the search for alternative energy sources there's one form of energy you don't hear much about, which is ironic because I'm referring to sound energy. Sound energy is the energy produced by sound vibrations as they travel through a specific medium. Speakers use electricity to generate sound waves and now scientists from Korea have used zinc oxide, the main ingredient of calamine lotion, to do the reverse – convert sound waves into electricity. They hope ultimately the technology could be used to convert ambient noise to power a mobile phone or generate energy for the national grid from rush hour traffic.
Piezoelectrics are materials capable of turning mechanical energy into electricity, and can be substances as simple as cane sugar, bones, or quartz. Much research in this field has been focused on transforming the movement of a person running, or even the impact of a bullet, into a small electrical current, but although these advanced applications are not yet available in consumer products, scientists have been using piezoelectric materials in environmental sensors and speakers for years.
The Korean researchers were interested in reversing this process however. "Just as speakers transform electric signals into sound, the opposite process – of turning sound into a source of electrical power – is possible," said Young Jun Park and Sang-Woo Kim, authors of the article in journal Advanced Materials.
Piezoelectrics create an electrical charge under stress, and thus zinc oxide, the main ingredient of calamine lotion, was bent into a field of nanowires sandwiched between two electrodes. The researchers subjected the sandwich to sound waves of 100 decibels which produced an electrical current of about 50 millivolts.

On average, a mobile phone operates using a few volts, and as a normal conversation is conducted at about 60-70 decibels it's clear the technology falls some way short of being genuinely useful yet, but the researchers are optimistic that given time they can improve the electric yield. They hope future applications could include mobile phone charging from conversations, or sound-insulating walls near highways that boost the national grid using energy generated from rush hour traffic noise. However, with the increasing popularity of near silent electric vehicles there might be a decreasing window of opportunity for that particular application.

More realistic pet robots that recognize and respond to human emotions

Sony’s Aibo may be discontinued, but robotic pets of all shapes and sizes continue to stake a claim in the hearts of people around the world. Despite the apparent intelligence of some of these robot pets, their behavior and actions are usually nothing more than pre-programmed responses to stimuli – being patted in a particular location or responding to a voice command, for example. Real flesh and blood pets are much more complex in this regard, even discerning and responding to a person’s emotional state. Robotic pets could be headed in that direction, with researchers in Taiwan turning to neural networks to help them break the cycle of repetitive behavior in robot toys and endow them with almost emotional responses to interactions.
Building fully autonomous artificial creatures with intelligence akin to humans is a very long-term goal of robot design and computer science. On the way to such machines, home entertainment and utility devices such as "Tamagotchi" digital pets and domestic toy robots such as Aibo, the robotic dog and even the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, have been developed. At the same time, popular science fiction culture has raised consumer expectations.
In an effort to provide entertaining and realistic gadgets that respond to human interaction in ever more nuanced ways, mimicking the behavior of real pet animals or even people, researchers in Taiwan are now looking at a new design paradigm that could see the development of a robot vision module that might one-day recognize human facial expressions and respond appropriately.
"With current technologies in computing and electronics and knowledge in ethology, neuroscience and cognition, it is now possible to create embodied prototypes of artificial living toys acting in the physical world," Wei-Po Lee and colleagues at the National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), Kaohsiung, explain.
There are three major issues to be considered in robot design, the team explains. The first is to construct an appropriate control architecture by which the robot can behave coherently. The second is to develop natural ways for the robot to interact with a person. The third is to embed emotional responses and behavior into the robot's computer.
The researchers hope to address all three issues by adopting an approach to behavior-based architecture - using a neural network - that could allow the owner of a robot pet to reconfigure the device to "learn", or evolve new behavior and at the same time ensure that the robot pet functions properly in real time.

The team has evaluated their framework by building robot controllers to achieve various tasks successfully. They, and other research teams across the globe, are currently working on vision modules for robots. The technique is not yet fully mature, but ultimately they hope to be able to build a robot pet that could recognize its owner's facial expressions and perhaps respond accordingly. Such a development has major implications for a range of interactive devices, computers and functional robots of the future.

Silicon carbide technology to take electronics to the extreme

New technology using silicon carbide electronics could enable radio transmitters that can withstand temperatures of up to 900 degrees Celsius (1,652 F). No, it’s not being developed so listeners can enjoy their favorite breakfast DJ in a worst-case global warming scenario. Rather the team behind the research envisions devices that could be dropped into the depths of the earth to provide early warning of a volcanic eruption or to provide real time data from the inside of a jet engine or nuclear power plant.

Building reliable components that will continue to work under extreme conditions has been an on-going challenge for electronic engineers. To ‘go where no technology has gone before’ and unlock the secrets of some of the world’s harshest environments, a team from Newcastle University in England is using a compound of silicon and carbon called silicon carbide (SiC), or carborundum, which is already used in high temperature/high voltage semiconductor electronics.

Strong bonds

Because of its unique molecular structure – which is more stable than silicon – SiC also has a high radiation tolerance opening up possibilities for its use in the nuclear industry. The secret of SiC is the much stronger bonds between the silicon and carbon atoms, which also require more energy to release electrons for electrical conduction. However, this also makes it more difficult to manufacture into components.

The team has successfully managed to develop the necessary components and is now working to integrate them into a device about the size of an iPhone that could be used in a variety of locations such as power plants, aircraft engines and even volcanoes.

Dr Alton Horsfall, who leads the SiC work alongside Professor Nick Wright, explains: "At the moment we have no way of accurately monitoring the situation inside a volcano and in fact most data collection actually goes on post-eruption. With an estimated 500 million people living in the shadow of a volcano this is clearly not ideal.

"We still have some way to go but using silicon carbide technology we hope to develop a wireless communication system that could accurately collect and transmit chemical data from the very depths of a volcano," Horsfall said.

Volcanic monitoring is just one of the strands of research being carried out at the Centre for Extreme Environment Technology.

Underwater and the underground

With expertise in underwater communications, Professor Bayan Sharif, Jeff Neasham and Dr Charalampos Tsimenidis have developed a micro Remotely-Operated Vehicle that can be used to feed back environmental data about our coastlines. The team is also working on through metal communications which involves transmitting a signal through almost 10cm (3.9-in) of steel and wireless sensor networks.

"If someone sets off a bomb on the underground, for example, this will still sit on the wall and tell you what’s going on," says Dr Horsfall. “If a dirty bomb has gone off you want to know what’s happened before you send anyone in."

Professor Nick Wright, pro-vice chancellor for innovation and research at Newcastle University, added: "The situations we are planning to use our technology in means it’s not enough for the electronics to simply withstand extremes of temperature, pressure or radiation – they have to continue operating absolutely accurately and reliably.

"Increasingly mankind is spreading out into harsher and more extreme environments as our population grows and we explore new areas for possible sources of energy and food in order to sustain it. But with this comes new challenges and this is why research into extreme technologies is becoming ever more important."

Gesture Remote looks to control the TV of the future

How many device remotes do you have? One for the TV, one for the DVD/Blu-ray player, one for cable/satellite box, one for the hi-fi and perhaps even one for the computer – have I missed any? Maybe you've tried to consolidate all of these various remotes into one big universal control with lots and lots of buttons. The Gesture Remote offers something a bit different. The simple interface is completely free of buttons and spatial thumb gestures are used to access menus and choose content.

The Gesture Remote prototype from IDENT Technology, LUNAR Europe and Zinosign offers intuitive remote control without the need for buttons as we understand them today. The remote uses something called Z-Sense technology, which is based on the GestIC 3D user interface we first saw in the Gesture Cube

concept. The technology detects and tracks three-dimensional, mid-air hand, finger or body movements and translates the gestures into software commands. It not only registers position but direction and velocity of spatial movement too.

This universal remote for the 21st Century has been designed and created to serve a new multimedia world where users need to go beyond simple channel-hopping on the TV and access on-demand services, social networking services and web-based file-sharing portals. Instead of being faced with a huge number of buttons, a user would access and control menus and content with simple gesturing above the surface of the device.

Using a thumb over the top surface, the Gesture Remote can act as a virtual mouse to drag and drop, click and select or can scroll, flick, rotate, or zoom in & out for volume control and channel selection. A circular motion, for instance, brings up the electronic program guide, where the interactive multimedia experience awaits. A light tap on the surface confirms an action.