A paper thin sensor to check on your cardio-vascular system

It really looks like a plain bandage but if you detach it you’ll discover a patch, not bigger that a stamp that is able to sense variations of tension on your skin with a very high precision.

You can see it in the photo on the side (credit: L.A. Cicero/Stanford University): it has been designed to monitor not just your heart but also the cardio-vascular system as a whole.

When our heart beats it sends a pressure wave that is detected by the sensor under the bandage. Its strength and periodicity can provide important information on your heart workings. That first pressure wave is followed by a much tinier set of waves generated by the tissue response to the first wave (like a spring that is compressed by the first wave and then bounces back once the pressure wave is gone). These further waves can tell a lot about our vascular system: a sclerotic vein, or artery, generates a different response to the pressure wave than a normal vessel. By being able to capture and measure the tiny variations of these waves the sensor can provide most useful information on the status of our cardio vascular system. Obviously, the sensor is just picking up the variations of skin tension but these variations are transmitted to a computer, the one in your smart phone would be perfect, for analyses and comparison with previous sets of measurements so that even more meaning can be derived.

Notice that the cell phone might act as an integrator (this is my speculation, not presented by the researchers at Stanford), picking up information about your movement, as an example: if you are jogging (and this can be inferred by the cell phone accelerator, or if you are walking in a city rather than in a forest, by the seaside or on a mountain (and this is known through the positioning system in your cell phone) the data coming from the sensor lead to a different sort of information and all together, taken in different situations, can provide an amazingly accurate picture of the health of your cardio vascular system.

To create such a precise, flexible and unobtrusive sensor researchers at Stanford have overlaid on a thin rubber sheet two electrodes. The whole is thinner than a dollar bill. The rubber band is composed of tiny pyramids. Variation in the tension of the skin produces a variation in these pyramids, just a few microns each, and in turns changes the distance between the two electrodes leading to a variation in the electromagnetic field. Et voila! these is the data provided by the sensor to the computer for analyses.

The system is both sophisticated (a very precise distribution of the pyramids) and simple and so it is easy to manufacture at a very low cost. We can expect to find these kinds of monitoring devices on our body in the near future with our cell phone acting as the local interpreter of what is going on and as a relay point to more sophisticated analyses.

The tiny implant

EPFL has announced the development of a “sensors” that can be embedded under the skin to test blood. It communicates via radio to a patch on the skin that provides also the energy. This latter transmit via Bluetooth the information to the cell phone where an apps provides to transmit it to the doctors computer.

The impact, a few cubic millimetre, contains a sensing array able to detect a variety of molecules, not just the ones in the blood, also the ones that percolate in the intracellular fluid. And of course, you can expect that this is just the start. More and more substances will be detected in the future!

The implant is set a few millimetre under the skin, and can be placed there using a special injector in a matter of seconds. A patch is then positioned over the skin. This patch contains a microchip to manage the communications with the sensor and the one with the cellphone. It also contains the battery to power the chip and the sensor (via radio waves).

The patch shall be charged every few days (or more often depending on the frequency of measurements).

I really see a changing medicine unfolding where telecommunications is a key enabler.

Researchers are progressing in developing automatic cars that can efficiently take us from point A to B.

Imagine: arriving at a road intersection and zip through it without even paying attention and possibly leaving just a yard between crossing cars!

A bit scaring, I have to say, but it looks like it is feasible. At least this is what a team of researchers from the Virginia Tech Transportation Research group are claiming in a paper presented at the Vienna conference on intelligent transportation.

What they are proposing is an integration between the road infrastructure and the vehicles. On the one hand they assume autonomous vehicles that can drive themselves by assessing road and traffic condition and communicate with one another to avoid accidents and to optimise traffic flow. On the other hand they see huge complexities that can be solved by having the road infrastructure taking the control at intersections.

Basically, the idea is that any car arriving in the proximity of an intersection declares where it needs to go (straight, turn left, turn right) and the infrastructure assigns a slot and a speed thus making sure that there is no conflict (potential collision paths).

The big hurdle that I see is that these approaches assume that all cars are indeed connected to the infrastructure and can drive under its control. It will take decades, likely, before we will reach that point, so in a way it looks more likely a solution where the decision is indeed taken autonomously by each single car (if that car is an autonomous car) or by the driver.

Anyhow, take a look at the animation, and try to imagine yourself in one of those cars….

Scientist have learnt to use light in many different ways to create, transport and read an information. Your television is an example of a device able to convert an electrical signal into light to reach your eyes as an image. And your digital camera is an example of a device able to capture light and convert it into an information (a flow of electrons that are used to code the information in bits).

To achieve high speed in coding information into light and capturing light to decode the information requires lasers and special components that are used at the end point of optical fibre in telecommunications, thus allowing the transport of thousands of billions of information per second (on the big pipes). On the other hand, the conversion made by a television is made by LCDs and LEDs technology that can work at a snail pace, if compared to the ones achieved in optical fibre: few hundreds cycles per second (that is billions of times slower than what is used in telecommunications fibre). The same applies to the digital camera sensors where we can reach some thousands information capture per second (a professional digital camera can have shutter time as low as 1/8000 of a second, still some billion times slower than fibre).

Schematics of the Antenna on a Chip

Now a group of researchers at the Rice University have managed to create a chip that can be manufactured using the CMOS technology, hence with present state of the art fabs, and that can work at a 10GHz rate, the same used in telecommunications on fibre.

This enables the construction of new devices with exceptional performances at low cost.

The technical name for the chip is “micron scale Spatial Light Modulator”, or SLM for short, and it can be seen both as a receiving or emitting antenna (as all antennas are).

One application they are considering is developing a digital camera having a 1 pixel sensor! Today’s digital camera have millions of pixels but since those are receiving information at a maximum rate of a few thousands per second, having one pixel sensor that can receive information at a rate of tens of billions per second would provide and equivalent “quality”. Of course you would need a system able to move continuously that pixel to intercept rays coming from different points, so that the image can be constructed. It will require completely different cameras, that would be so much smaller and so much cheaper! Indeed it would revolutionize our idea of digital photography, with a camera that can capture absolutely everything in perfect focus, without focussing!

And the photographer in you that would immediately start to objects since defocusing (bokek) is an important part of the composition of a photo will have to acknowledge that a bit of post processing can easily create all the defocussing one may wish to have (it is already a standard feature of CS6).

Let’s get ready for yet another shift in our (falsely) consolidated world.

Our skin, as the covering tissue of all living things, plants and animals alike, has same very interesting characteristics: it let fluids flow out of the body but stops fluids entering the body, is sensitive to a variety of external conditions (particularly the one covering animals) and can in many instances self repair after a trauma.

The broken skin on the left has healed in the photo in the right

Scientists have been looking for replicating these characteristics in artificial skin for robots, and also for those robots that can be used as prosthetics to replace a missing limb in a person.

Creating a material that is able to “sense” has been high in the priority list of researchers since robotics became mainstream. You want to give sensing capability to robots “limbs and hands” whatever shape they might have so that the robotic brain can process the sensations and react accordingly, the same way our brain does.

Even a simple action like picking up a glass gets extremely complex if you do not have sensitivity in your fingers, actually it gets close to impossible (you need to look carefully and still that might not be enough since not “feeling” the glass makes it impossible to decide the strength to apply…).

Now we have a number of materials that are able to sense and that are flexible enough to be usable in a robotic hand. But as soon as you start using it you run the risk, as we sometime experience, of breaking the skin. Up until now, breaking the sensory surface of a robot skin meant you had to replace it.

Now, scientists at Stanford have created an artificial skin that can also repair itself without losing its sensing and conductive characteristics.

The trick was to use loose binds among the polymer molecules based on Hydrogen atoms. If the skin gets broken, cut, it is sufficient to push the two edges together and they automatically recreate the binds sealing the rupture within a few minutes. This is even better than our natural skin that usually takes 5 days to restore continuity.

Interestingly these characteristics have been designed at the computer, and through this design researchers have decided to use specific types of nickel molecules to ensure conductivity. It is really the dawn of a new world where we are learning to design material characteristics. This results in more and more smart materials.

This new “skin” is also intended to be used in prosthetic limbs to replicate the sensation of a real hand. The sensing at the skin level is coded in electrical signals that a computer, in the skin, can adapt into appropriate signals to the person nerves for brain stimulation. The team at Stanford is also working on this communication mechanism based on bio-implant as I mentioned in a previous post.

How many times did you ask that and may be expected to be invited to taste it yourself? Quite straightforward, dig your fork in that spaghetti and meat balls and … taste them!

Of course you would not expect your question to be fully satisfied if you were calling a friend over your smart phone. Smart goes only as far…

An haptic jacket on a chicken let Adrian pat it from his office…

But now a professor at the Keio University, Adrian Cheok, is working to let you taste from a remote location directly on your cell phone!

This is part of his general interest to transform the Web from a place of information to a place for experiences. He has developed a variety of haptic interfaces like the one shown in the photo where a chicken donning a special haptic jacket can feel the “patting” sensation when he is patting a chicken doll in his office at the University.

Now he has invented a lollipop that through electric and thermal stimulation is able to recreate taste on your tongue.

Actually taste is a very complex sensory experience. If you don’t believe me, try to taste an apple with your eyes closed and your nose pinched so that you miss both the visual and olfactory stimulation. The taste will be completely different, and nothing like an apple!

Thus, the lollipop can provide you with sensations of the six basic taste components, salt, sugar, bitter, acid, metallic and umami, but it cannot really provide you with the “real” taste that is created in your brain as result of a multi-sensorial experience.

Still, it may be fun to try it … or no?

Have a look!

Everything is getting smart, so why not have “smart stitches”? This is what researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign did.

A suture thread with sensors overlaid in a spiral way

They have embedded sensors inside surgical suture threads to make it possible the measurement of temperature. It is well known that the first sign of something going wrong in a surgical suture is an increase of temperature. By having the sensors inside the suture itself it is possible to monitor with extreme accuracy what is going on.

The challenge faced by the researchers were to create a structure that can resist bending and stretching.  This has been achieved by creating a strip of silicon just a few hundred nanometre thick and bending it in a spiral way, as shown in the photo on the left, around the suture thread. That is then covered by a polymer layer to provide the desired strength. When bending the polymer stretches and the core thread compresses whilst the sensors woven around the core suffer minimal stress.

The sensors can also double up as heaters thus easing healing.

The team has tested these electronic sutures on rats with satisfactory results. The technology is already being used in catheters and is commercialised by MC 10 a start up based in Cambridge, Mass.

In the future this technology can be coupled with porous polymers to allow the dispensing of drugs on command. Heating the polymer will open the pores and dispense the drug.

By engineering materials at the nanoscale we can open amazing possibility in health care by integrating electronics and bio in a seamless continuum.

Yesterday was a great day for physics with the seminar at CERN announcing the identification of the Higgs boson at 5 Sigma (a very very high statistical certainty). At the same time, as I watched the seminar, scientists were saying that this is just the beginning. The Standard Model explains the part of the Universe we see, that is about 4% of what is out there (and in here!) since that very Standard Model is claiming for much more mass, so invisible to be called “darK”.

Dark matter detector

It is therefore most appropriate that other scientists are proposing to develop a sensor to precise to be able to detect the dark matter. The approach is similar to the famous Michelson Morley experiment that, by failing to find the ether, opened up a neck chapter in physics with the Einstein insight on the structure of space time.

To detect what has been undetectable so far you need a sensors that is way more sensitive that anything we ever had. And scientists from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and from Harvard in Cambridge are doing just that.

By bridging physics and genetics they are developing a thin foil of gold, as shown in the picture, to which they attach millions of DNA strands. The idea is that as the Earth rotate during the day on its axes and during the year around the sun it intercepts dark matter and some of it should push an atom of gold out of the sheet.

This atom becomes a bullet that cross the forest of DNA strands attached to the foil and cuts a few of them. The cutter strands are collected in a lower tray and once a hour they are collected and cloned billions of times through bio genetic engineering. This provides sufficient material to be analyzed and by looking at the percentage of different strands the physicists should be able to work out the path of the bullet.

By collecting millions of these paths they bet to be able to detect the dark matter. Indeed, this sensor will have a sensitivity that is billions of times greater than the best sensor we have today….

Will this experiment eventually find the dark matter or will it become a replica of the Michelson and Morley one enabling a future Einstein to explain that no dark matter was found because there is no dark matter? I just hope to be around to see this question answered.

Not talking about your little kid (kids whimper but they don’t yelp, do they?) but about your dog. Well now Fujitsu is coming to your help.

They have just announced the development of a device that can be attached to the dog’s collar to monitor several parameters to measure their level of activity and possibly some signs of sickness.

In the announcement they say the device will be made available in the second half of 2012 and will provide connectivity to a cloud. People (not the dog, indirect biz model!) will subscribe to a service and I can easily imagine that one may subscribe to different levels of services, depending on what kind of data analyses you want.

The service has been demonstrated at the Fujitsu Forum on May 17 and 18 in Tokyo. The device embeds a number of sensors and accumulates data. Using your cell phone (with FeliCa feature, widely available in Japanese cell phones, since it is used for mobile payment) you get the data from the collar and they are automatically transferred to the cloud.

Through a dedicated web page you can look at data as they are interpreted by a number of applications, in part coming with the service but, I guess, in part acquired by you through third party offering. It is an example of open data and leveraging them.

What I find interesting is the fact that this may create a very interesting test bed for trying health applications leveraging on data without all the hassle one has to face when dealing with human data. Clearly the dog is not as sensitive as we might be about revealing his whereabouts and physiological data.

The success in this “dog” market may stimulate applications focussing on human health. Don’t underestimate the potential for success. The Bowlingual system (a cell phone embedded in the dog’s collar that detects the dog’s mood and translate that into sentences -up to 200 different emotions) had a significant success in Japan!

Can you tell a glass of sparkling mineral water from Alka Seltzer, a “just ripe” melon from one that should be eaten only after a few days?

A NASA developed sensors for your iPhone to sense the environment

We perceive our environment through our eyes and they can only detect certain light wavelengths. Actually there are many more wavelengths available (and insects are able to exploit some of them). What if we insert in our cell phone a sensors that can be used to look at what is around detecting a much larger wavelength set? This is what some researchers at the Media Lab are trying to do.

Already today digital camera sensors (and the one in our cell phone are derived from those) can detect a broader wavelength set than the one detected by our eyes, and this is why manufacturers overlay on the sensor a filter to cut out those extra wavelengths. Remove that filter and you can get more data from the filter that would actually let a computer see more and discriminate characteristics in the environment (current sensors can detect infrared wavelength so a computer can get information on temperature of the object in the image…).

New sensors can be developed to intercept much broader wavelength spectrum and there may be a system of filters that can be over layered to restrict wavelengths depending on the purpose of the photo. There might even be sensors having individual pixel with different sensitivity to wavelength (or with different filter over layered) and these can be selected via software, thus allowing the detection of different characteristics in objects.

This is what people at the Media Lab are working on, embedding a sensor in your cell phone you can use to find out more about your environment. To this filter a glass full of Alka Seltzer would look very different from one filled with sparkling mineral water, a ripe melon looks different from one you are not supposed to eat for a few more days…

More specialized sensors are also in the making, such as the one shown in the photo, developed by NASA to fit your iPhone. This sensor plug in the iPhone port and can detect a number of substances in the environment. An app in your phone (or in the web for more serious analyses) can process these data and give you a quite different view of the place you are in.. It can also be used to create a map of the environment as more and more cell phone report data. Get ready for a new way to look around yourself!