How many time we have thought “it would be nice if I just think of calling my friend and ,voilà, my cell phone dials his number!”. May be not that but something equivalent: turning our thoughts into immediate action with no cumbersome interface.

Samsung is working on BCI to control a cell phone.

Well, progress in BCI, Brain Computer Interface, is now turning the question into “when will it be possible…”. Our wish, indeed, may be granted soon.

On the left a photo of a soft helmet being experimented by Samsung to pick up electrical signals generated by thoughts in our brain and decode them via a computer to generate commands to a cell phone.

Now, it is clear that I do not want to wear such a thing! But researchers are progressing in making such an helmet invisible, by replacing it with a chip that can be implanted under the scalp. That would solve the aesthetics issue but the whole thing is going to open up a can of worm!

Suppose we will come to a point that you can be implanted at very low cost and with no pain nor physical side effects a chip that can pick up your thoughts and send them to a computer (let’s assume the one in your cell phone) and therefore you, or may be not you but many people, will choose to have such an implant.

The possibility to connect at light speed thinking and acting may give a competitive advantage in many field and so one might suppose that over time a growing number of people will make BCI a mainstream reality.

What are the legal implication? This is what an article on Technology Review is wondering about.

Who is going to be accountable if something breaks down and you do not what you though but something different? Or, even more likely, you changed your mind a millisecond after having sent the command…? The delay between thinking and acting is saving our day many times over!

And, of course, this is just the beginning! What if we get hacked? Our thoughts gets stolen, made public?

The fact is we have been evolved through the eons within a very precise framework: the impossibility to know for sure what another person is thinking. And even if we might guess what is going on in another brain we do not know for sure what will be going on in the next second… This impossibility, or uncertainty, has shaped our behaviour and our social relations.

If this framework crumbles we find ourselves completely unprepared in a social sense. And this is the one that is most crucial to our life. Indeed it is ever more true that new solutions beget new problems!

Once in a while you stumble upon a piece of text that you wrote, in your mind, a few years earlier and it feels good to see your thoughts in print.

Hypercities let you learn the past from what you see around you.

This is the case when I read yesterday this article dealing with the Future of Education.

The author reflects on the fact that the MOOCs, the new wave of using on line courses to learn, are just the same classroom we have been used to in the past. The only difference is that rather than going to a brick and mortar classroom you can stay home and follow the lessons.

I don’t think this is completely true, as an example you are completely free to roam in the cyberspace and get much more info, and compare it, than it ever was the case in a classroom.  However, there is quite some truth into that view.

The author then goes on considering how technology could reinvent learning. What if, and this is what brought me back to the study we did at the Future Centre few years ago, you use your cell phone, or whatever can connect the real world around you to the virtual one on the Web? You would be looking at a cityscape and you will get views on what that city was, and how it changed. You might even see, and hear, people talking in 1789 in the street of Paris during that faithful July in front of the Bastille. And one can imagine that what one person sees might be different from what another person may see at that same location, depending on his interest and “major”.
The question, is not technology: we know we can do that today and more so in the future. The question is the effectiveness of learning using this approach. Here I am no expert, but I have to say that I can easily see that this way of learning may very well flank the traditional one and bring several benefits.

We are seeing a number of projects that are leveraging on cell phones and use augmented reality as a way to deliver information, possibly customising it to the viewer.

Whether you agree or not, something is changing and reading that article surely makes you think.

Most cell phones today have a digital camera and a growing number of digital cameras start to have a connection of same sort (usually WiFi). What about connecting a cell phone with a digital camera?

Well, there have been a number of apps letting you to use your cell phone as a trigger for remote click. We can expect to have the possibility of seeing the image on our cell phone in a sort of “Live View” mode (if you happen to be a Nikonian you know what I mean…).

Now I see that Trigger is proposing an App, on Android and IOs, that capitalise on both the cell phone and the camera to enhance your photographic capabilities.

The figure on the left gives you an idea of what can be done.

You connect your cell phone to your camera (using a dongle) and you can control it leveraging on some of your cell phone capabilities.

In the case shown you take advantage of the GPS in your phone to direct the camera to take a picture every 10 m. The App on the cell phone will measure the distance with the GPS and will trigger the camera to shot.

It is just a tiny example (there are more with this specific application) but it shows that the cell phone and a digital camera can operate as a new system cooperating with one another.

I feel this is going to be a path of evolution in the coming years. Objects will talk to one another more and more and the overall ambient will grow in capability.

Another interesting twist resulting from this evolution is that some objects may “de-facto” take up the role of “orchestrator” and possibly “virtualizator”.
My cell phone may take up the role of my personal interface. As I start to control my camera through it, I might get used to have that interface and as I will change the camera once a new sensor becomes available I will continue to use my cell phone. More photographic features will be controlled through the phone and will be “provided” by the phone.  In the end this might change the whole value chain.

Take a look at the video showing Trigger in action:

[vimeo 40453214]

Over and over I had posted news on the potential use of cell phones as tools in health care. Actually, there are already several applications running on smart phones being used by doctors, from information support to diagnostics.

Cell sorting on a chip, as small as a cent

We are still seeing significant progress here, and of course the reasons are on the one hand the tremendous number of cell phones, we will get within this decade to one cell phone for each person on the Globe (in many Country this is already the case), and on the other hand the progress in technology that can miniaturise a “lab” to fit on a phone.

One example is this lab on a chip, so small that it could easily fit in a smart phone.

The chip is able to sort up to five different kind of cells and analyse them.

It has been designed by researchers at Penn State University.

It works by subjecting the flow of cells flowing into a channel to acoustic waves. By changing the frequency of the waves different types of cells respond in different ways. The channel, as shown in the figure, is split into several other channels that are receiving the different types of cells being sorted out.

Today to accomplish this operation you need to use big (and costly) machine. This invention slashes the cost and opens the way to perform several kind of analyses on your couch, directed by a doctor (or a computer-doctor) that will talk partly to you and a lot with your cell phone….

Stroke image on a smart phone

A recent study by Mayo Clinic confirms the potential of smartphones for use in tele radiology. 53 patients suffering from a stroke where independently analysed by two teams of doctors, one using the approved medical procedure with large screen to view the CT scans, the other using a smart phone to view them and the results showed no difference in terms of correct analyses.

Add to this the miniaturisation of sensors and you have a smartphone that is transformed into an always on medical monitoring system that is likely to change the way we look at medicine. Like having a black box monitoring our life, ready to set up red flags for proactive medicine.

Partners in crime…

Just finished the COMSOC East Asia Society Summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, and I should say the reports presented triggered a few thoughts.

We had representatives from China, Taiwan, India, Vietnam (in the photo), and a few reports from other East Asia Countries (there were 40 people from Asia plus a 100 Vietnamese).

I have to confess, I am still not used to big numbers and when I heard that India is adding 8 million new cell phone users a month and still they will have to go ahead at this pace through this decade to get close to 100% penetration I feel small. And today there are still over 500,000 villages in India that do not have proper telecommunications service.

Vietnam used to be rivers of bikes just few years ago. Now there are rivers of motorbike, and each rider has a cell phone….

I was impressed by the report that they have reached in 2009 17 million land line connection (out of a population of 88 million people) AND that in 2010 the number went down to 14 million and now is down to 12 million! At the same time the cell phone “population” has grown to 111 million…

The cell phone is killing, at least in Vietnam, the land lines. The penetration in Internet terms is much lower, only 15% use the cell phone to connect to Internet but it is easy to predict that this percentage will increase as more and more people will be able to buy a smart phone. Their price is still too high for most Vietnamese. Consider that a basic cell phone in Vietnam cost as little as 20$, whilst a smart phone costs at least 8 times as much…

In Vietnam the cost for unlimited wireless (3G) connectivity is 2$ per month. Even considering the lower cost of life in Vietnam this is still dirty cheap!

There does not seem to be, in spite of the large penetration of wireless Internet in all East Asia, a use of Internet as a foundation for e-government services. It is still more related to personal entertainment (or social communication).

In the next few days all presentations will be available on the COMSOC web site.

Our nose provides smelling sensations that although often underestimated are important to our everyday life. Of course the “sensitivity” of our nose is really low in comparison with a dog’s nose. Still, replicating the capability of sniffing and smelling in a computer (equipped with sensors) has been a big challenge to researchers.

Nanotechnology based sensors on a chip to power an electronic nose

Over the years researchers have been able to create artificial, electronic, noses that can detect specific odours but not a broad range of them.

Now it looks like we are getting closer to “iSniffing”, an artificial nose that can exceed our nose sensitivity and that can be applied in a variety of fields.

Nosang Myung, a professor at the University of California Riverside, has created a sensors based on nanotechnology that has a broad and good sensitivity to odours.

Olfactor Laboratories, a US company, has developed the chip. The whole system is about 4 by 7 inches but the goal is to reduce it to the size of a credit card. The chip as such has been designed to be fit for embedding in a cel phone or a tablet.

The applications can range from agricultural (detecting pesticide levels), production in industry (detecting leaks, emissions) and also as warning system for bio-terrorism.

It may also have medical applications, such as studying children’s asthma for correlation with the insurgence of symptoms as a function of air pollution.

In the future we may expect to see cell phones equipped with these sensors, like today we have got used to have gyroscope embedded in out cell phones. Robots are also like to use these sensors to get a better perception of their environment.

Image advertising the Tawkon App

Few days ago I run into an article on Wired talking about a new App released by Tawkon that is providing information on the level of radiation you have been exposed during the day (or week, month …  whatever) by using your cell phone.

The article provides an explanation of some basic terms like SAR and also some background on the potential effect of electromagnetic radiation.

I am not an expert in the field, although I have been working for several years with researchers studying SAR for cell phones and taking care of the scientific communications, so I do not want to comment on the potential damage, if any, resulting from exposure to cell phone radiation.

What I am interested in is the thin line existing between data and information. Unfortunately, most of the time we tend to mix the two, we perceive data as information and this is misleading.

In this specific case Tawcon App is measuring the electromagnetic field of your cell phone taking data from the cell phone chips (your cell phone has to know what kind of power to use to send signals to the remote antenna) and applies an algorithm to calculate the cumulative effects. However, there is no scientific proof indicating that electromagnetic radiations have a cumulative effect on bio-material (that is your head..) and the cell phone does not know how you are using it (e.g. you may have it in contact always on the left ear, sometimes you switch ear, sometimes it is not in contact at all …).

Hence, the data accumulated are basically meaningless. Tawcon is careful to state that the apps is just to warn you of the use of your cell phone and it is up to you to decide if that usage level is too much (too dangerous). But if the data are meaningless, what actually is the information provided? Zilch!

What is wrong, in my opinion, is that by providing data we create a perception that does not correspond to a scientific fact. And this goes both ways. You may scare people, or you may provide a false sense of assurance.

I guess this is one of the big problems we have always faced, but in the Internet age with the abundance of data the risk of being misled is even greater.

Proteus Digital Health has announced the availability of tracking tags that can be embedded in prescription pills able to get power directly from the stomach acids. Once they are powered up they transmit a signal that is intercepted by a patch on your skin that will relay that signal to an application on your cell phone for transmission to a health monitor support centre.

The patch may also contain additional sensors to monitor your heart beat and respiratory frequency plus the kind of activity you are involved in during the day.

The tags are so cheap that it is not an issue (in terms of money) to swallow and then discard them.

For the first time the FDA has given the green light for its use in the mass market. This is a major milestone in the path toward digital medicine. So far these kind of devices were allowed only for use by doctors and in hospital environment. This has been possible thanks to the ingenuity of powering the tag with the stomach acids, getting rid of the need for a battery. This latter contains poisonous materials and that is why so far electronic devices have been reserved for usage under medical supervision.

Take a look at the video explaining how it works:

[vimeo 45229049]

We can rest assured that this is just a fist step in the way to continuous monitoring of our health with the cell phone playing the role of seamless tethering to monitoring centres.

Samsung has announced the availability of TecTiles, basically a programmable beacon that your phone can read to activate certain functions.

A TecTile can be read by any NFC (Near Field Communication) enable phone, like the Samsung Galaxy SIII. You hover the phone over the tile and it reads its identity thus activating a specific application.

You can place one of these in your car dashboard. Once you board the car just hovering your cell phone on it may put our cell phone in car mode, activate the bluetooth communications with the car and possibly signal to Facebook you are now driving or create a Tweet.

You can buy 4 TecTiles for 15$ and the application to program them (and your phone) comes free.

I guess we can expect plenty of preconfigured sets of actions to become available so that what you just need is to download the one you like. It is a quite new way to interface with the world and to adapt your cell phone to it.

If you are like me, and all the rest of us, you don’t like to have a needle pricking you, even if it is for your good sake, like blood testing. That’s why I bet you’ll be pleased to know that researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology, Technion, have demonstrated a device that can use a beam of light to look inside your blood vessels and determine the RBC, WBC and all other nice acronyms you find on the paper reporting the blood exam result.

Computer rendering of the observation of a capillary through light penetrating the skin

In the image above you see what a computer can create as an image from the data detected by the reflection of a sam of light through the skin. It is much more than a rendering. What you see it is a capillary and the raisin like blobs are red blood cells (RBC, if you like acronyms). The computer can measure the density of RBC, and look at their shape to detect possible diseases. It can count withe blood cells (WBC) and the various types thus providing all the information you normally get through a pricking needle. and it can do that almost instantaneously.

Schematics of the blood analyses system

The system includes a probe and a detector that beam and receives the reflected light through a set of lenses in a stick that is placed over the skin. A PC receives all the data and process them creating the report (the graphic rendering is normally not done, although the shape of RBC is sometime of interest, like in case of possible sickle cell anemia.

You can place the stick over many parts of the body, in the demonstration the researcher used the lips. The probe emits a multi-wavelenght light and the reflection splits the wavelength providing the raw data that are fed into the computer for analyses. The technique is based on spectral encoded confocal microscopy (SECM). The light beam is scattered when it hits a blood cell and carries a spacial information that is used to single out red from white cells.

The analyses is pretty complex since one has to take into consideration the motion of the cells and compensate for that.

The device is portable, making it particularly useful for use in areas where the normal paraphernalia of medical testing equipment is not available.

In the future, it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine our cell phone performing this kind of analyses. True, it would require an increase in performance and decrease in price of (may be, out of the hat) 1,000 fold, but that is what happens in 8-10 years. We are already carrying in our hand the supercomputer capacity of the 80ies, at an infinitesimal fraction of the price they had.