In-shoe device harvests energy created by walking

Although you may not be using a Get Smart-style shoe phone anytime soon, it is possible that your mobile phone may end up receiving its powerfrom your shoes. University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering researchers Tom Krupenkin and J. Ashley Taylor have developed an in-shoe system that harvests the energy generated by walking. Currently, this energy is lost as heat. With their technology, however, they claim that up to 20 watts of electricity could be generated, and stored in an incorporated rechargeable battery.

While the details of the energy-harvesting technology are proprietary, it is said to involve a process known as "reverse electrowetting," which was discovered by Krupenkin and Taylor. It converts mechanical energy to electricity via a microfluidic device, in which thousands of moving microdroplets (of an undisclosed non-toxic, inexpensive liquid) interact with "a groundbreaking nanostructured substrate." The process is said to have a power density of up to one kilowatt per square meter (10.76 sq. ft.), plus it works with a wide range of mechanical forces, and is able to output a wide range of currents and voltages.

The battery is hermetically sealed, for protection against water and dirt. In order to get the power from it to the phone or other mobile device, the two would have to be temporarily physically joined with a wire, although the researchers are also looking into the use of conductive textiles and wireless inductive coupling.

Besides directly powering the phone, the device could also serve as a mobile WiFi hotspot, linking the phone to a wireless network. Having its own hotspot constantly nearby could drastically increase the phone's battery life - this is because the phone would only need to transmit in a low-power standard such as Bluetooth in order to reach the device, which would then use its own battery (which would be continuously getting recharged, by walking) for the high-power long-range transmissions to the network. Krupenkin claims that this could allow phone batteries to last up to ten times longer than normal.

The U Wisconsin technology is currently in the process of being commercialized, through Krupenkin and Taylor's company, InStep NanoPower. If it does make it to the marketplace, it may have some competition - Dr. Ville Kaajakari is also developing a piezoelectric device for shoes, that generates power as its user walks.

Solid-state capacitor said to combine best qualities of batteries and capacitors

Capacitors are able to charge and discharge more quickly than batteries, and can do so hundreds of thousands of times. Batteries, on the other hand, are able to store more energy than capacitors. There are also electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs), otherwise known as supercapacitors, that can hold battery-like amounts of energy while retaining the charge/discharge speed of regular capacitors. EDLCs incorporate liquid or gel-like electrolytes, however, which can break down under hot or cold conditions. Now, a new solid-state supercapacitor developed at Houston's Rice University is using nanotechnology to get around that limitation.

The Rice researchers started out by growing an array of 15-20 nanometer bundles of single-walled carbon nanotubes, each up to 50 microns in length. This "nanotube forest" served to maximize the surface area available to electrons.

That array was subsequently transferred to a copper electrode, that included thin layers of gold and titanium to help with electrical stability and adhesion. In an atomic layer deposition process, the bundles (which served as the primary electrodes) were next doped with sulfuric acid to boost their conductivity. They were then covered with aluminum oxide, which served as a dielectric layer, and aluminum-doped zinc oxide, which acted as the counterelectrode. Finally, the circuit was completed with a top electrode of silver paint.

The Rice supercapacitor is reportedly stable and scalable, holds a charge under high-frequency cycling, and isn't adversely effected by harsh temperatures. It could also be incorporated into other materials, allowing for electric car bodies that double as batteries, or microrobots that serve as their own power supply.

"All solid-state solutions to energy storage will be intimately integrated into many future devices, including flexible displays, bio-implants, many types of sensors and all electronic applications that benefit from fast charge and discharge rates," said Cary Pint, who co-led the research.

Technology that combines the attributes of capacitors and batteries is also being developed at the University of Illinois, where scientists are creatingnanostructured lithium-ion batteries that charge and discharge 10 to 100 times faster than regular li-ions.

The business legacy of Mr. Jobs

Revered by many, hated by some, but respected by most, the indisputable fact remains that Steve Jobs is the most successful business leader of his generation and quite possibly of all time. The numbers are impressive in themselves but the most remarkable aspect of his success is how it was achieved. Though he remains at Apple, the end of his tenure as CEO is the end of an era and an opportunity to try and grasp just exactly what it is he did and what lessons there are for all of us "trying to make a dent in the universe."

The 41 year old Steve Jobs who arrived back at Apple in 1996 had already had a lifetime's worth of business experience. Due to the success of the Apple II personal computer he had a multi-million fortune by the age of 25. Doubtless he felt that he could do no wrong. The next fifteen years however were a series of tumultuous mistakes and betrayals that saw Steve being thrown out of the company he created and suffering significant failures at Pixar, the computer graphics division he bought from George Lucas, and NeXT, the business computer company he created. These were crucial experiences in Steve's transition from entrepreneur to business leader.

Failure

Neither company could make a profit and in both cases the problem was hardware. Pixar were involved in the creation of very high-end rendering machines for their animations but they weren't selling any and the cost was killing them, or rather Steve, since they were operating solely off his bank account. His pride couldn't let them fail. Eventually Steve stops the hardware development, fires half the workforce, keeping only the Renderman (CG rendering software) programmers and crucially John Lassiter's animation department - the only department making any money.

At the same time the beautifully designed NeXT Cube computer was simply too expensive for individuals to buy and could not compete with the likes of Sun Microsystems and IBM in the enterprise market. In a devastating blow The COO of NeXT tried to sell the company from under Steve's feet to Sun. It didn't come off but the writing was on the wall. NeXT closed their manufacturing plant, losing 300 workers, and became a small software company, licensing the excellent NeXT operating system that they had developed in tandem with the hardware. This was the lowest point and by 1993 Steve Jobs had virtually retired to be with his new young family at the age of 38.

Big Bucks

John Lasseter at Pixar was recognized as one of the finest animators in the business and had won several awards for adverts and short films. Jeffrey Katzenburg at Disney tried to lure him to the "Magic Kingdom" but Lasseter knew he would get buried at Disney and wanted to stay with his team. Eventually Disney agreed a deal for Pixar to produce three full-length animated movies for US$27 million each with Pixar getting 12.5% of gross - a surprisingly poor deal - but Pixar and Jobs knew no better at the time. The first Toy Story script was rejected out-of-hand but Lasseter eventually turned it around to Disney's liking and by 1995 the film had been made. Steve actually had little to do with the running of Pixar at that stage but turned up at a preview screening to see Disney's Pocahontasand Toy Story back to back. He very quickly realized what the team at Pixar had achieved and saw how the deal with Disney could turn into something very big indeed.

Jobs swiftly took over the reins at Pixar and brought on board a CFO with Wall Street credibility to prepare for an IPO (Initial Public Offering) on the Stock Exchange. It seemed a ridiculous idea - Pixar had never made a profit - but Jobs was convinced that Toy Story was going to be a massive hit and timed the IPO for a week after the film's release. Sure enough the film opened at $28 million and went on to gross $127 million. The IPO was a massive success and Steve Jobs was suddenly worth $1.5 billion. Controversially, most of the Pixar workers got nothing. Jobs went back to Disney and demanded a new 50/50 deal for the next two films - and got it. Incredibly, in 2005 when Disney boss Michael Eisner was finally fired, Pixar and Jobs engineered a "reverse-takeover" of Disney Studios that cost Disney $7.5 billion and put Pixar's Ed Catmull and John Lasseter in charge. Steve Jobs remains Disney's largest shareholder.

Apple 2.0

Apple in 1996 was in a poor state. Windows 95, Mac clones, an ageing operating system, a lacklustre roster of products and an equally uninspiring CEO meant that Q4 1996 was one of the worst financial quarters ever. Uncharacteristically Jobs had refused to take up the offer of a hostile takeover of the company by Oracle's Larry Ellison in 1995 but when Apple went shopping for a new modern operating system Steve managed to convince the board to buy NeXT for $400 million and he became an "informal advisor" to the CEO Gil Amelio. While Amelio stumbled and mumbled through his presentation at the WWDC of January 1997, Steve Jobs ended the developer conference with a remarkable one hour Q&A session in which the roots of everything we see today from Apple are plain to see. Within months Amelio had been sacked and Jobs agreed to take the position of "Interim CEO." Apparently he was concerned about being CEO of two public companies but one suspects that there were deeper psychological effects at play. It's as if Jobs felt he had to earn his place at Apple again and not just be handed the keys.

Steve launched himself into Apple's turnaround with extraordinary energy. A deal was done with Microsoft to end all hostilities, guaranteeing MS Office for Mac for five years and securing a symbolic $150 million share deal. Jobs famously remarked that the PC wars were over and that Microsoft had won. This deftly stopped the constant market-share comparisons and allowed Apple room to get quietly profitable. A new advertising company was engaged and a series of cool black and white photos of iconic people with the slogan "Think Different" were produced to play on the notion of Apple as the maverick underdog capable of changing the world. Jobs interviewed every product team and asked them to justify themselves. Gil Amelio had got the number of Apple projects from 350 down to 50 - Jobs got it down to 10. Life at Apple quickly changed - smoking was banned and a fantastic new cafeteria created. A policy of absolute secrecy concerning product development was introduced and strictly enforced. Porting the NeXTSTEP operating system to the Mac platform began and a product strategy consisting of only four segments was devised: Pro Desktop, Pro Portable, Consumer Desktop, Consumer Portable.

iMac

A quiet Brit, Jonathan Ives was working on a side project at Apple for a network computer. He wasn't happy and wanted to leave but Steve Jobs was impressed with his ideas and sensibilities and made him Head of Industrial Design. They worked closely together on the design of the "Internet Mac" for the consumer desktop segment and this became the original Bondi Blue iMac. It was launched in the same room as the original Mac was 14 years earlier in an occasion heavy with symbolism and emotion, and the clear message that Apple was back and reconnected to its roots. It was of course a massive success.

All Steve's experience and the lessons learned in the previous years had come to this point, and from this point the seeds of all Apple's subsequent successes were sown. He had seen a talent in Jon Ives and immediately put him in a position to exploit that talent. They worked on a design that was unique yet true to the physical essence of the computer, which of course at that point was the CRT inside. They developed a new plastic composition to take the heat of the processor while allowing them translucency and color. The machine had a cute face and a rounded form to make the emotional connection that was so important for the success of the first Mac but had consequently been lost at Apple. They also worked hard to ensure that the machine was actually affordable, in part by removing a bunch of legacy connectors and the floppy disc drive. A move that shocked the tech community but delighted customers - a common theme to come. The iMac was also noteworthy for introducing the mass market to USB, a connection technology invented by Intel that was frankly dying. With Apple committing to it as their only peripheral connector on consumer machines there was an explosion of activity by peripheral manufacturers wanting to standardize on USB. Here was a new phenomenon - a vast ecosystem of subsidiary manufacturers emerging around the popularization of a standard.

A few months later the G3 PowerMac was introduced in a new Bondi Blue plastic case, the iMac now came in five fruit colors and the brightly colored iBook was launched. The share price rocketed and in two years the turnaround had been achieved. Steve now entered what might be called the visionary phase at Apple.

Millennium

At the beginning of the new century a number of significant things occurred; Steve now felt able to call himself CEO, the first iteration of Mac OSX was released, the "Digital Hub" strategy was conceived and the first Apple retail store was opened. The last two are particularly interesting in that they flew against all the received wisdom of the time. Everybody was obsessed with the Internet. PC's would become simple "thin clients" to remote servers and all computers would be bought on-line. Jobs disagreed vehemently. In fact he had to disagree because if that was indeed the future then Apple was undoubtedly doomed. Even with all the talk about market-share being irrelevant Apple was still stuck at 5 percent and needed a strategy to push consumers to switch from PC's to Macs. Steve positioned the Mac as the center of your "digital lifestyle," connected to your still cameras, video cameras and music players. Apple started to produce software to allow mere mortals to edit their photos, video or make a DVD. Apple also noticed, a little late in fact, how the craze for downloading music from Napster or from your own CD collection was snowballing. iTunes was created in just a few months to allow you to rip from CD's and organize your music library.

Shops and Pods

Jobs felt that although they were now making a superior product, PC users simply wouldn't get over their inertia and buy a Mac unless they saw and felt how well designed they were and how easy to use. The retail strategy was a risky and expensive one and Steve knew it. He drafted in retail heavy-hitters from Gap and Target and built a dummy store in a warehouse to get the meticulous design exactly right. At the same time an engineer, Tony Fadell, was trying to sell a small mp3 music player that he had invented and nobody was interested. Jobs immediately saw the potential and nine months later the beautifully designed white iPod with a unique click-wheel interface and a huge capacity was launched. It was quite expensive but nobody cared. It was exactly what people wanted for their new digital music collections and it became the new Walkman, selling massively across the world.

Truth be told Jobs and Apple were shocked by the numbers but as per usual they wasted no time in exploiting the phenomenon and all the logical steps that followed. An iTunes for Windows, a whole range of iPods and eventually the iTunes music store. Steve's experience with Disney was particularly useful in persuading the record companies that they really had no option but to offer their wares through the iTunes store. This symbiosis of hardware and software that only Apple could do was finally the magic combination that brought Apple products to the attention of the whole world. Mac market share began to increase and the retail stores started to become the most profitable pieces of real estate in the world. From 2004 on, Apple's profits rose exponentially.

Intel

By June 2005 the transition to OSX was complete with 10.4 proving to be the most solid and popular release. Apple had a problem however, the PowerPC processors it was using, made by IBM, were too power hungry and hot to be used in the smaller and lighter portable laptops that were becoming such an important market segment. In addition they were perceived as slow by the tech community. Jobs revealed to a shocked audience that they had been writing an Intel compatible version of OSX in parallel all this time and that Apple would be moving to an all Intel line up. It was a masterstroke. Life became much easier for developers wishing to port to the Mac and in any case you could run Windows on it if you really had to. Another psychological barrier to Mac ownership had been removed.

iPhone

The iPod had re-kindled Job's interest in the possibility of a hand-held computer. He hated the PDA's of the time and had famously killed the Newton on his return to Apple. As early as 2003 Steve was playing with a handheld touchscreen that some of the engineers had programmed with the inertial scrolling and bounce that we see today. At some point there came a eureka moment when Jobs saw that the "killer app" of a hand-held could be as a phone. In fact you could make the easiest phone possible. The existing mobile phones were very poor in how their functions were accessed and most people just used them for calls. Once again Jobs saw a unique opportunity and the next few years were spent developing the hardware required, creating a port of Mac OSX to work on that hardware, and negotiating with the mobile carriers to ensure that the iPhone experience was unique. Plus of course in typical Steve Jobs style getting a better deal than any other handset maker.

The iPhone was launched in January 2007 and Jobs understood completely the significance of the event. If Apple got this right, then rather than fighting a decades-old battle of Mac verses PC they would be creating an entirely new computing market, potentially dominating it for years to come. The launch of course was an extraordinary success and again Apple were quick to iterate all the logical steps that followed that success - the App Store and eventually in 2010 the iPad. What's remarkable about the iPad is that although the operating system is exactly the same, the form factor and the context in which it is used have created yet another unique market segment that Apple continues to dominate.

Health and Legacy

It's no secret that since 2003 Steve Jobs has faced severe health problems. It's no secret either that these problems seems to have taken a dark turn since 2008 culminating in his resignation last week. An event timed to perfection in typical Jobsian style at the point when Apple briefly became the most valuable quoted company in the world. In many ways the past few years have seen Steve preparing Apple for a future without him. Tim Cook has been with Apple for 15 years and Steve's second in command since 2004 - there was never any doubt of his succession. Steve has instigated an internal "University" for the numerous Vice Presidents of the company run by an ex-Yale business professor to teach them the "Apple way." In one of his final acts as CEO he obtained planning permission for a quite extraordinary new head office campus building that should meet Apple's needs for at least a decade.

Lessons

So what can Steve Jobs teach us about success? Well there really is no secret - the usual clichės apply - passion, vision and focus. In Jobs however these qualities are turned up to 11 and certainly in his early career caused much friction and upset to those around him. As some close to him have said, in later life he learned how to "ride the beast within" and become an extraordinary leader. Steve himself said, "you have to have a crazy passion for what you do because without it you will never put up with what's necessary for success". Steve is also famous for maintaining a vision of how he believes the world will be in five, ten or even twenty years time and planning accordingly, "we try to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is". Apple is an extraordinarily focused company and this of course comes from the top. Job's obsession with the slightest detail is legendary and Apple prototypes many more products that are rejected than are ever produced, "in a way we are prouder of the hundreds of products we throw out than the few we make."

In a few years Apple will very likely become America's first trillion dollar company and that will be due in large part to the "Apple DNA" that Steve Jobs has created, in the end his greatest triumph.

Apple's spaceship campus revealed

With the success that Apple has achieved over the past decade, it's perhaps no surprise that it has outgrown its original "Infinite Loop" campus and is in need of a new flagship headquarters to bring the teams together under one roof. Since Steve Jobs will undoubtedly have been the driving force behind the building's conceptual design and hey, it's Apple, the architecture for the new campus is unlike anything else ever built. Indeed, Apple saw fit to engage London-based über-architect Sir Norman Foster and his team, a company known for its unashamedly modern, hi-tech and unique approaches to large buildings such as the Stanstead and Hong Kong airports, the American Air Museum, the Berlin Reichstag, the Dallas Opera House, The Smithsonian and part of the World Trade Center re-development. The statistics of the proposed building are staggering.

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The diameter of the ring is 1,615 feet (492.25 meters), which makes it wider than the Pentagon. The circumference will be nearly a mile (1.6 km) and the planned office floor space is 2.8 million square feet (260,128.5 sq m) including a 300,000 square foot (27,870.9 sq m) research facility. That's enough space for 12-13,000 workers - in comparison, Infinite Loop houses only 3,500 engineers at present. There will also be space for their cars underneath the ring and in an additional low-rise structure, though Apple already runs 20 bio-fuel buses for its employees and intends to extend the initiative.

A separate 1,000-seater underground auditorium (for product announcements to the media, undoubtedly), fitness center and natural gas-burning power generation plant complete the plan. The campus will be self-sufficient for power, with the national grid acting only as a back-up. Apple, and Steve Jobs in particular, was stung by criticism of its green credentials from environmental groups some years ago, so you can be sure that a mix of state-of-the-art green technologies will be employed to control the building's environment ... something that Foster + Partners and the building engineers Arup reportedly have long experience in.

The 150-acre (60.7 hectare) site was mostly purchased from Hewlett Packard (Jobs' very first employer) and Apple intends to make almost 80 percent of the site into green landscape, with an extra 2,300 trees. No structure is over four stories high, and the use of glass and the extensive planting means the building should blend well into its surroundings, considering the size.

It should be stressed that at this time this is a planning application only. Steve Jobs, however, commended the plan to the Cupertino City Council in person, describing it as a "landed spacecraft" and "a shot at creating the best office building in the world." Later, Cupertino's Mayor Gilbert Wong remarked, "there is no chance we are saying no!" Apple is hoping to move on to the new campus in 2015.

M-DISC offers up to 1,000 years of data storage on a DVD compatible disc

Despite the widespread belief upon their introduction to the market in the early 1980s that CDs would safely store data encoded on them forever, CDs and DVDs are actually susceptible to damage from both normal use and environmental exposure and have an average lifespan of under 10 years. A new optical disc company based in Salt Lake City called Millenniata is set to deliver a new type of optical disc that can be read on standard DVD drives but will safely store data for up to 1,000 years.

The new disc, called M-DISC, stores data in the same way as CDs and DVDs - as a series of pits - but instead of the pits being burned into organic dyes using a laser as is the case with traditional optical discs, the pits are literally etched into a layer of a "rock-like material" composed of inorganic materials and compounds including metals and metalloids using a higher powered laser. The resultant pits aren't affected by temperature, humidity or sunlight. Millenniata says it expects this layer would actually remain readable for over 10,000 years, however, the polycarbonate layers it is sandwiched between are the weak links and would only be reliable for at least 1,000 years.

An accelerated life test performed by the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division tested the M-DISC against five brands of conventional archival discs currently on the market and found that the M-Disc suffered no degradation or data loss, while all the other discs failed. The data stored on an M-DISC will even survive being dipped into a vat of liquid nitrogen at -180°C (-292°F) before being transferred to a container of near boiling water - handy if that's how you treat your DVDs.

M-DISCs are a write-once technology designed as a cheap permanent backup solution that is still backwards compatible with existing DVD drives, including consumer DVD players. Millenniata says its M-DISCs offer comparable performance to standard DVDs and provide the same 4.7 GB storage capacity as a single-sided, single-layer DVD. The company says it is also currently working on a Blu-Ray version of the M-DISC to provide greater storage capacity.

Millenniata has partnered with Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Inc, which will manufacture M-READY DVD drives and sell them under its DVD brands. There's no word on what these devices will sell for, but the M-DISCs will be priced at US$2.99 for a single disc, $13.89 for a pack of five, and $26.59 for a pack of ten when they go on sale through the Millenniata websitenext month

Google to acquire Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion

Google has announced today that it is going to purchase Motorola Mobility for a price of US$40 per share, which adds up to a total amount of US$12.5 billion. Taking Google's patent wars into account, Motorola's portfolio of 17,000 patents could have been an important factor behind the deal. According to a blog post by Google's CEO Larry Page, Motorola will be run as a separate business, while Android will remain an open platform.

More than 150 million devices running Google's Android have been activated worldwide and this number is increased by 550,000 new devices every day, Larry Page says. While Motorola has been committed to the Android platform since 2008, with, for instance, the DROID line of smartphones, Larry Page calls the acquisition a "natural fit," adding that it's a way to improve the Android ecosystem and to enhance competition on the market.

The transaction, however, needs regulatory approvals from the U.S., the European Union, as well as Motorola Mobility's stockholders, and is expected to be closed by "the end of 2011 or early 2012," according to thepress release.

Motorola Mobility was formed in January 2011, after Motorola Inc. split into two companies. Motorola Solutions has been focused on enterprise-tailored solutions, while Motorola Mobility on cell phones and tablets. The company has certainly contributed to the development of the mobile industry in general, such as by having released the world's first portable cellular telephone and the StarTAC clamshell, and by being a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance.

According to a recent comScore report, in June 2011 Motorola was ranked as the third mobile OEM in the U.S., with 14.5 percent of mobile subscribers using its devices (smartphone and non-smartphone), behind LG and Samsung, while globally Motorola was ranked 7th in 2010, with just a 2.4 percent market share, according to Gartner.

Swarmanoid robots work together ... to steal books

Swarms of small, intercommunicating robots are now being eyed up for all sorts of potential uses, including the creation of communications networksfor disaster relief, mapping out hazardous environments, or even perhaps helping with the colonization of Mars. Since 2007, a group of European research groups have been collaborating on the now-completed Swarmanoid project, in which a variety of purpose-specific mini robots where programmed to cooperate in order to accomplish a task. Although the bots have been perfecting their book-stealing routine since 2009, a video depicting the task won the Best Video award at last week's 2011 Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco, and was many peoples' introduction to Swarmanoid.

The robots involved in the task included several Hand-Bots, Foot-Bots and Eye-Bots.

The Hand-Bots are capable of climbing up vertical surfaces, using their two mechanical arms and grippers. They are assisted in doing so by a magnetic grappling hook, that shoots out of their top and attaches to the ceiling - using a line attached to that hook, they can then winch themselves up. They also have a couple of ducted fans, that they use to spin themselves around when hanging from their grappling line.

The Foot-Bots can move across the floor on wheels, and feature side grippers that they use for grasping other objects. They have dual cameras and 360-degree infrared sensors, for finding their way around.

Finally, there are the Eye-Bots. These camera-equipped quadracopters are able to search for specific objects, and are capable of attaching themselves to overhead surfaces. They also feature infrared distance sensors and sonar.

The process starts with a group of Eye-Bots flying through a building, each one stopping to hook itself onto the ceiling at various points along their journey. When one of them spies the book in a bookcase, it relays that information back along the line of other parked Eye-Bots, which have formed a connected network. This signal ultimately reaches the deployment area, where the Hand-Bots and Foot-Bots are waiting.

Because the Hand-Bots cannot move across the ground on their own, one of them requests that the Foot-Bots pick it up, and move it to the bookcase. While two of them respond to that request, a number of others position themselves beneath the linked Eye-Bots, creating a ground-based path for the Hand-Bot-carrying Foot-Bots to follow.

Once deposited at the bookcase, the Hand-Bot uses it arms, grippers, grappling hook and fans to climb up the edge of the bookcase, grab the book, then bring it back down. The Foot-Bots then pick it back up, along with its book, and return it to the deployment area. A second Hand-Bot has meanwhile been brought to the bookcase, should it be needed.

The Swarmanoid research project wrapped up last September, although the lessons learned through it could be applied to scenarios such as search-and-rescue missions, or the replacement of human workers in dangerous locations.

The proof-of-concept book-stealing caper can be viewed below.

Source: IEEE Spectrum

Skin-mounted electronics that can be applied and worn like a temporary tattoo

Wearable electronics generally take the form of clothing embedded with electronics or miniature electronic devices that can be worn close to the body for purposes such as medical monitoring and communications. Now engineers have developed a device that places electronic components onto an ultra-thin skin-like patch that can be mounted directly onto the skin, paving the way for skin-mounted electronics that could be used for sensing, medical diagnostics, communications and human-machine interfaces.

While the researchers have previously developed thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates that almost completely dissolve when implanted inside the body, the new patches are initially mounted on a thin sheet of water-soluble plastic and are then laminated onto the skin with water, just like applying a temporary tattoo. The researchers say the electronic components could also be applied directly to a temporary tattoo itself to conceal the electronics. Because the circuits are fabricated as tiny, squiggled wires, their wavy, snakelike shape allows then to bend, twist, wrinkle and stretch with the mechanical properties of skin, while maintaining functionality.

The researchers say skin-mounted electronics could be used to replace conventional EEG and EMG sensors for the monitoring of nerve and muscle activity without the need for conductive gel, tape, skin-penetrating pins or bulky wires. They are also more comfortable and less cumbersome than traditional electrodes and give the wearers complete freedom of movement so they can be worn in a natural environment during normal activity.

"If we want to understand brain function in a natural environment, that's completely incompatible with EEG studies in a laboratory," said University of Illinois (U of I) electrical and computer engineering professor Todd Coleman, who co-led the multi-disciplinary team responsible for developing the device. "The best way to do this is to record neural signals in natural settings, with devices that are invisible to the user."

Additionally, skin-mounted electronics could be used to let patients with muscular or neurological disorders to communicate or interface with computers or, when the sensors are applied to the skin of the throat, they can distinguish muscle movement for simple speech. The researchers have already used the electronic patches to control a video game to demonstrate the potential for human-computer interfacing.

The researchers, led by John A. Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder professor of engineering at the U of I, have demonstrated their concept by mounting a variety of electronic components, including sensors, LEDs, transistors, radio frequency capacitors, wireless antennas, and conductive coils and solar cells for power, on a thin, rubbery substrate.

"The blurring of electronics and biology is really the key point here," said Yonggang Huang, a professor at Northwestern University who, with his group, collaborated with Rogers to create the patches. "All established forms of electronics are hard, rigid. Biology is soft, elastic. It's two different worlds. This is a way to truly integrate them."

Because the researchers used simple adaptations of techniques used in the semiconductor industry, they say the patches are easily scalable and manufacturable. Rogers has co-founded a company, mc10, which is already working to commercialize certain versions of the technology.

The researchers are also working to integrate the various devices mounted on the platform so that they work together as a system, instead of as individually functioning devices. They are also working to add Wi-Fi capabilities.

"We think this could be an important conceptual advance in wearable electronics, to achieve something that is almost unnoticeable to the wearer," says Coleman. "The technology can connect you to the physical world and the cyberworld in a very natural way that feels very comfortable."

Speaking, interactive dashboard avatar could replace owner's manuals

At one time not all that long ago, cars had a warning light on the dashboard that simply said "ENGINE." That's pretty vague. Really, it might just as well have said "CAR." Some newer automobiles now have codes that appear on the console, which the driver must then look up in an index in the vehicle's owner's manual. Working with Audi, Germany's Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) Institute of Business Informatics is now working on taking things a step farther, with the development of an on-screen avatar that will talk to drivers, and even understand their spoken questions.

The experimental Avatar-based Virtual Co-driver System (AviCoS) is designed to work with the monitor of the Audi Mulitmedia Interface, which already comes standard on all of the automaker's vehicles.

The system uses artificial intelligence to understand drivers' spoken questions about their car, and responds verbally. Descriptive images and videos also appear on-screen, with the animated avatar character pointing out relevant details. In Touch and Tell mode, drivers can also receive explanations of various vehicle functions by touching the appropriate areas of the screen.

As with many such driver assistance technologies, there is the possibility that AviCoS could distract drivers from paying attention to the road. The designers have somewhat addressed that problem, by suppressing first the image of the avatar, and then all of the graphics, as the vehicle's speed increases. Drivers remain able to converse with the avatar, however, which could still be distracting.

Down the road, the TUM researchers would like to see the system being able to identify the driver's state of mind, by analyzing their tone of voice and speech rhythm. If AviCoS determined that the driver was getting stressed out, it could lessen their sensory overload by suppressing its video output. Working with the car's other systems, it could also do things such as instructing the navigation system to provide directions earlier, and more often.