#A New Chip Could Add Motion Sensing to Clothing A company called mcube has made a new kind of accelerometer, the device that senses motion from inside a smartphone or fitness monitor.
The component is small and cheap enough to lead to smart electronics in clothing and sports equipment.
so immediately after you swing you can get an analysis on your smartphone. Accelerometers are made usually of two chips:
In fact, the company says its new accelerometer is sensitive enough to replace the gyroscope in a smartphone.
This could perhaps bring sophisticated motion-sensing capabilities to even the cheapest smartphones, some of which lack gyroscopes.
Nearly 70 million of mcube sensors have already been shipped to electronics manufacturers in China for use in smartphones.
But several experimental options for energy harvesting or wireless charging might eventually make that possible (see Batteryless Sensor Chip for the Internet of Thingsand obile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery w
#Longer-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices A type of battery that could eventually store twice as much energy as a conventional one could be about to move beyond niche applications to wearable devices phones and even electric cars.
Applied materials one of the world s biggest equipment suppliers for the semiconductor and display industries says it can make these batteries much cheaper.
and the solid electrolyte that separates them in much the way that the many layers of a display are deposited.
however that one of the first commercial applications of its equipment will likely be making batteries for wearable devices such as smart watches where size is a serious limitation.
In 2013 China became the third biggest user of natural gas behind the United states and Russia, consuming 166 billion cubic meters (bcm).
#Turning a Regular Smartphone Camera into a 3-D One Microsoft researchers say simple hardware changes
and machine learning techniques let a regular smartphone camera act as a depth sensor. Just about everybody carries a camera nowadays by virtue of owning a cell phone,
but few of these devices capture the three-dimensional contours of objects like a depth camera can.
if our phones capture the contours of everything from street corners to the arrangement of your living room,
Yet while efforts like Google Project Tango are adding depth cameras into mobile gadgets, new research from Microsoft shows that with some simple modifications
and machine-learning techniques an ordinary smartphone camera or webcam can be used as a 3-D depth camera.
The idea is to make access to developing 3-D applications easier by lowering the costs and technical barriers to entry for such devices,
Microsoft modified camera A group led by Sean Ryan Fanello Cem Keskin, and Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research is due to present a paper on the work Tuesday at Siggraph, a computer graphics and interaction conference in Vancouver, British columbia.
To modify the cameras, the group removed the near infrared filter, often used in everyday cameras to block normally unwanted light signals in pictures.
By doing so, they essentially made each camera act as an infrared camera. computer with Microsoft image of person's face e kind of turned the camera on its head
The Microsoft team says it wanted to use the reflective intensity of infrared light as something like a cross between a sonar signal and a torch in a dark room.
But the group needed to train the machines (in this case a Samsung galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Microsoft Lifecam Web camera) on that relationship,
After building up a set of training data, which included images of hands, the group found it could measure a person motions at a speed of 220 frames per second.
While the training data focused on faces and hands, the group wasn actually training the machines to recognize hands or faces,
The huge amount of training data allows the machine to build enough associations with the data points in the pictures that it can then use additional properties of the image to estimate the depth.
Microsoft chose skin since it has so many implications for navigating Xbox and Windows environments, but Kohli points out that the machine learning techniques could transfer anywhere. he only limitation is
what sort of training data that you give it, he says. he approach in itself can be tailored to work on any other scenario. n
#Super-Fast Pixels Could Make Smartphones Brighter and Longer-Lasting Displays account for between 45 and 70 percent of the total energy consumption in portable electronics.
A new kind of liquid crystal display (LCD) with pixels that switch much more quickly could give smartphones brighter screens
or make them last longer on a charge. The design uses new materials from Light Polymers, a startup based in South San francisco. In an LCD,
a layer of liquid crystal material in each pixel switches from one state to another to block the passage of specific colors of light.
and one green, that illuminate all of the pixels in the display in very rapid successionoo quickly for the eye to perceive.
The color of each pixel then depends on perfectly timing when it opens to let light through.
The design is actually similar to one used for early televisions. In a conventional LCD, pixels switch much too slowlyn the range of a couple of millisecondsor the technique to work.
Technology presented by Light Polymers at the 2014 Emerging Display Technologies conference in San jose this week could allow switching in less than 60 microseconds.
It involves using a new material that strongly anchors a kind of liquid crystal that switches pixels on and off very quickly.
The new designnown as a sequential displayould help LCDS close the energy efficiency gap with another type of display, the OLED.
OLEDS are used in some smartphones and TVS, but are more expensive to produce. Marc Mcconnaughey, CEO of Light Polymers, says the company materials are being evaluated by flat-panel display manufacturers.
They can be swapped in for materials currently used in manufacturing lines, which could make it easier for producers to switch over s
#Terahertz Chip Identifies Short Strands of DNA One of the more significant practical challenges currently occupying molecular biologists is to find better ways of identifying short strands of DNA.
#IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does A new kind of computer chip,
unveiled by IBM today, takes design cues from the wrinkled outer layer of the human brain.
and other sensory data. IBM Synapse chip processes information using a network of just over one million eurons,
which communicate with one another using electrical spikess actual neurons do. The chip uses the same basic components as today commercial chipsilicon transistors.
The Synapse chip breaks with a design known as the Von neumann architecture that has underpinned computer chips for decades.
In a demonstration at IBM Almaden research center, MIT Technology Review saw one recognize cars, people,
A nearby laptop that had been programed to do the same task processed the footage 100 times slower than real time
and it consumed 100,000 times as much power as the IBM chip. IBM researchers are now experimenting with connecting multiple Synapse chips together,
and they hope to build a supercomputer using thousands. When data is fed into a Synapse chip it causes a stream of spikes,
and its neurons react with a storm of further spikes. The just over one million neurons on the chip are organized into 4, 096 identical blocks of 250,
an arrangement inspired by the structure of mammalian brains, which appear to be built out of repeating circuits of 100 to 250 neurons,
says Dharmendra Modha, chief scientist for brain-inspired computing at IBM. Programming the chip involves choosing
a programmer would work out the necessary settings on a simulated version of the chip, which would then be transferred over to the real thing.
In recent years, major breakthroughs in image analysis and speech recognition have come from using large, simulated neural networks to work on data (see eep Learning.
But those networks require giant clusters of conventional computers. As an example Google famous neural network capable of recognizing cat
and human faces required 1, 000 computers with 16 processors apiece (see elf-Taught Software. Although the new Synapse chip has more transistors than most desktop processors,
or any chip IBM has made ever, with over five billion, it consumes strikingly little power.
When running the traffic video recognition demo, it consumed just 63 milliwatts of power. Server chips with similar numbers of transistors consume tens of watts of powerround 10,000 times more.
The efficiency of conventional computers is limited because they store data and program instructions in a block of memory that separate from the processor that carries out instructions.
As the processor works through its instructions in a linear sequence it has to constantly shuttle information back and forth from the memory store bottleneck that slows things down and wastes energy.
IBM new chip doesn have separate memory and processing blocks, because its neurons and synapses intertwine the two functions.
And it doesn work on data in a linear sequence of operations; individual neurons simply fire
when the spikes they receive from other neurons cause them to. Horst Simon, the deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and an expert in supercomputing, says that until now the industry has focused on tinkering with the Von neumann approach rather than replacing it,
for example by using multiple processors in parallel, or using graphics processors to speed up certain types of calculations.
The new chip ay be a historic development, he says. he very low power consumption and scalability of this architecture are really unique.
One downside is that IBM chip requires an entirely new approach to programming. Although the company announced a suite of tools geared toward writing code for its forthcoming chip last year (see BM Scientists Show Blueprints for Brainlike Computing,
even the best programmers find learning to work with the chip bruising, says Modha: t almost always a frustrating experience.
His team is working to create a library of ready-made blocks of code to make the process easier.
Asking the industry to adopt an entirely new kind of chip and way of coding may seem audacious.
But IBM may find a receptive audience because it is becoming clear that current computers won be able to deliver much more in the way of performance gains. his chip is coming at the right time,
says Simon
#Stacking Cells Could Make Solar as Cheap as Natural gas When experts talk about future solar cells they usually bring up exotic materials and physical phenomena.
In the short term however a much simpler approach stacking different semiconducting materials that collect different frequencies of light could provide nearly as much of an increase in efficiency as any radical new design.
And a new manufacturing technique could soon make this approach practical. The startup Semprius based in Durham North carolina says it can produce very efficient stacked solar cells quickly
#Mobile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery A new breed of mobile wireless device lacks a battery or other energy storage,
but it can still send data over Wi-fi. These prototype gadgets, developed by researchers at the University of Washington,
get all the power they need by making use of the Wi-fi, TV, radio, and cellular signals that are already in the air.
The technology could free engineers to extend the tendrils of the Internet and computers into corners of the world they don currently reach.
Battery-free devices that can communicate could make it much cheaper and easier to widely deploy sensors inside homes to take control of heating and other services.
Putting low-cost, Wi-fi-capable, and battery-free sensors behind couches and cabinets could provide the detailed data needed to make such thermostats more effective. ou could throw these things wherever you want
and never have to think about them again, says Shyam Gollakota, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who worked on the project.
The battery-free Wi-fi devices are an upgrade to a design the same group demonstrated last yearhose devices could only talk to other devices like themselves (see evices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals and Need No Power Source.
Adding Wi-fi capabilities makes the devices more practical. Gollakota hopes to establish a company to commercialize the technology,
which should also be applicable to other wireless protocols, such as Zigbee or Bluetooth, that are used in compact devices without access to wired power sources,
Engineers have worked for decades on ways to generate power by harvesting radio signals from the air, a ubiquitous resource thanks to radio, TV
and cellular network transmitters. But although enough energy can be collected that way to run low-powered circuits,
the power required to actively transmit data is significantly higher. Harvesting ambient radio waves can collect on the order of tens of microwatts of power.
But sending data over Wi-fi requires at least tens of thousands of times more powerundreds of milliwatts at best
and typically around one watt of power, says Gollakota. The Washington researchers got around that challenge by finding a way to have the devices communicate without having to actively transmit.
Their devices send messages by scattering signals from other sourceshey recycle existing radio waves instead of expending energy to generate their own.
To send data to a smartphone for example, one of the new prototypes switches its antenna back and forth between modes that absorb
and reflect the signal from a nearby Wi-fi router. Software installed on the phone allows it to read that signal by observing the changing strength of the signal it detects from that same router as the battery-free device soaks some of it up.
The battery-free Wi-fi devices can harvest enough energy to receive and decode Wi-fi signals in the conventional way.
But they can detect the presence of the individual units, or ackets, that make up a Wi-fi transmission.
To send data to the battery-free device a conventional Wi-fi device sends a specific burst of packets that lets the receiving device know it should listen for a transmission.
The data is then is encoded in a stream of further packets with gaps interspersed between them.
Each packet signals a 1 and each gap a 0 of the digital message. Ranveer Chandra, a senior researcher in mobile computing at Microsoft Research, says the technology could help accelerate dreams of being able to deploy cheap,
networked devices that have been slow to arrive. iven the prevalence of Wi-fi, this provides a great way to get low-power Internet of things devices to communicate with a large swath of devices around us,
he says. RFID tags, which also lack batteries, are the closest technology in use today, says Chandra.
But they can only communicate with specialized reader devices, he says. The Washington approach fits better with existing infrastructure.
However, increasing the range of the system will be important for it to be widely useful, notes Chandra.
The upcoming paper on the technology reports a range of only 65 centimeters, which barely spans a small table, let alone a single room in a house.
the market research firm Canalys predicts that more than 17 million wristband gadgets will ship this year,
is a much better source of data than the wrist because it offers an area where blood flows neatly in and out,
and Leboeuf contends it not necessary to keep them on constantly to collect useful data.
uses it in forearm-worn heart-rate monitors). But it also being used for a growing number of ear-worn devices,
including LG Heart rate Monitor Earphone and iriver iriveron Heart rate Monitoring Bluetooth Headset (available to consumers for $180 and $200, respectively) and a pair of earbuds from Intel,
and firefighters and changing the way we play video games. oul see games where your emotional state changes the character youe playing,
or outside the earbud) analyzes the data, removing oiselike skin movement or sunlight and extracting information like heart and respiration rates.
With accelerometer and blood-flow data, Leboeuf says, Valencell algorithms can also estimate things like the number of calories youe burned.
The data is sent then on to your smartphone. Leboeuf says Valencell technology has been validated by groups outside the company;
a paper he coauthored with researchers at Duke university medical school indicated that the company earbud sensor was able to accurately estimate total energy expenditure
Kevin Bowyer, chair of the University of Notre dame computer science and engineering department, who has studied iris
Like Bluetooth headsets and some noise-cancelling headphones, the Performtek technology needs its own power source to work.
the LG earbuds connect to a wearable clip that holds the battery and Bluetooth device,
But a pair of Performtek-using earbuds that Intel showed off this year at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las Vegaseant to be a reference design for manufacturersvoids this kind of bulk by harvesting power from the microphone jack.
Steve Holmes, who leads Intel New Devices Group, says this could also make it possible to add features like noise reduction.
Accelerometer data already being collected by the earbuds could even be used to create a sort of 3-D stereoscopic audio experience
#Cheap and Nearly Unbreakable Sapphire Screens Come into View This fall, rumor has it, Apple will start selling iphones with a sapphire screen that is just about impossible to scratch.
The supposed supplier of that sapphire, GT Advanced Technologies, can confirm as much. But this week the company showed
making it possible to add a tough layer of sapphire to just about any smartphone or tablet screen relatively cheaply (see our Next Smartphone Screen May be made of Sapphire.
The manufacturing technology known as an ion accelerator, can make fine sheets of other costly materials,
and the screens on some high-end phones that cost as much as $10, 000. But sapphire has been too expensive for widespread use.
A screen made entirely out of sapphire as the forthcoming iphone may be, remains five times as expensive as a regular one,
or $15 to $20 each. But laminating glass with sapphire could bring the cost down to $6, according to estimates by Eric Virey, an analyst for the market research firm Yole Développement.
Smartphone makers have taken long advantage of advances in glass production to make devices with stronger and more durable screens.
The most well-known of these screens is made from Corning Gorilla Glass, which is used in iphones.
But even Gorilla Glass is vulnerable to scratching and cracking, and replacing the glass is expensive.
#Super-Dense Computer Memory A novel type of computer memory could, in theory, let you store tens or even hundreds of times as much data on your smartphone.
Researchers at Rice university have demonstrated a more practical way to manufacture it. The type of memory in question, resistive random access memory (RRAM), is being developed by several companies,
but fabrication usually requires high-temperatures or voltages, making production difficult and expensive. The Rice researchers have shown a way to make RRAM at room temperature and with far lower voltages.
Like flash memory, RRAM can store data without a constant supply of power. Whereas flash memory stores bits of information in the form of charge in transistors
Some prototypes can store data densely enough to enable a terabyte chip the size of a postage stamp. hy don you have all the movies you would like on your iphone?
and coffee makersy the end of the year (see enser, Faster Memory Challenges Both DRAM and Flash.
each one so thin that the memory chip could still easily fit inside portable electronic products.
says Wei Lu, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, and cofounder of Crossbar.
But he notes there are several options for next-generation memory chips, and that getting advances to market is challenging. hile you can get many materials to switch,
#Prototype Display Lets You Say Goodbye to Reading Glasses Those of us who need glasses to see a TV
or laptop screen clearly could ditch the eyewear thanks to a display technology that corrects vision problems.
The technology uses algorithms to alter an image based on a person glasses prescription together with a light filter set in front of the display.
The algorithm alters the light from each individual pixel so that, when fed through a tiny hole in the plastic filter, rays of light reach the retina in a way that re-creates a sharp image.
Brian A. Barsky, a University of California, Berkeley, computer science professor and affiliate professor of optometry and vision science who coauthored a paper on it, says it like undoing
The technology is being developed in collaboration with researchers at MIT and Microsoft. In addition to making it easier for people with simple vision problems to use all kinds of displays without glasses,
the technique may help those with more serious vision problems caused by physical defects that can be corrected with glasses or contacts,
and a detail of a Vincent Van gogh self-portrait and applied algorithms that warped the image by taking into account the specific eye condition it was told to account for.
to whose display they had affixed an acrylic slab topped with a plastic screen pierced with thousands of tiny, evenly spaced holes.
Gordon Wetzstein, who coauthored the paper while a research scientist at MIT Media Lab, says the screen allows a regular two-dimensional display to work as what known as a ight field display.
This means the screen controls the way individual light rays emanate from the display, leading to a sharper image without degrading contrast.
Wetzstein says the next step is to build prototype displays that people can use in the real worldomething he expects could take a few years.
or requires software that tracks head movement and adjusts the image accordingly. Barsky expects this won be much of a problem,
when we look at a display that doesn look right, we tend to naturally move around to improve the focus.
if researchers used a display with a high enough resolutionbout double the 326 pixels per inch of the ipod Touch used in the paperhe technology could be made to be used by more than one person at once t
What if the compass app in your phone didn just visually point north but actually seemed to pull your hand in that direction?
and it suggests possibilities in mobile and wearable technology as well. Tomohiro Amemiya, a cognitive scientist at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, began the Buru-Navi project in 2004, originally as a way to research how the brain handles sensory illusions.
His initial prototype was roughly the size of a paperback novel and contained a crankshaft mechanism to generate vibration,
and relies on a 40-hertz electromagnetic actuator similar to those found in smartphones. When pinched between the thumb and forefinger,
Buru-Navi3 creates a continuous force illusion in one direction (toward or away from the user,
The second device, called Traxion, was developed within the last year at the University of Tokyo by a team led by computer science researcher Jun Rekimoto.
Traxion also generates a force illusion via an asymmetrically vibrating actuator held between the fingers. e tested many users,
Both devices create a pulling force significant enough to guide a blindfolded user along a path or around corners.
Google, and perhaps Apple are mobilizing to sell
#Can Technology Fix Medicine? After decades as a technological laggard, medicine has entered its data age.
Mobile technologies, sensors, genome sequencing, and advances in analytic software now make it possible to capture vast amounts of information about our individual makeup and the environment around us.
The sum of this information could transform medicine, turning a field aimed at treating the average patient into one that customized to each person while shifting more control and responsibility from doctors to patients.
here is a lot of data being gathered. That not enough, says Ed Martin, interim director of the Information Services Unit at the University of California San francisco School of medicine. t really about coming up with applications that make data actionable.
The business opportunity in making sense of that dataotentially $300 billion to $450 billion a year, according to consultants Mckinsey & Companys driving well-established companies like Apple, Qualcomm,
and IBM to invest in technologies from data-capturing smartphone apps to billion-dollar analytical systems.
as well as the corporate venture funds of Google, Samsung, Merck, and others, have invested more than $3 billion in health-care information technology since the beginning of 2013 rapid acceleration from previous years, according to data from Mercom Capital Group.
This MIT Technology Review Business Report looks at the technologies and companies most likely to survive the boom
The groups that control the most medical data today are insurance companies and care providers, and their data analysis is already beginning to change health care.
Express Scripts which manages pharmacy benefits for 90 million members in the U s . and processes 1. 4 billion prescriptions a year, has scoured its data from doctorsoffices, pharmacies,
and laboratories to detect patterns that might alert doctors to potential adverse drug interactions and other prescription issues.
Data brought in from electronic health records would add doctorsinsights, test results, and medical history. Genetic data would offer insight into
whether patients are predisposed to certain conditions or how they might react to treatments. e want to believe that most of the things we do in medicine are based on evidence,
Data is also changing the role of patients, offering them a chance to play a more central part in their own care.
One way is by using mobile technology to monitor sleep patterns, heart rate, activity levels, and so on.
which advises users on how much insulin they should take in light of information recorded on their smartphones:
and provides the patient doctor with treatment recommendations based on the data and established medical guidelines.
and help users avoid it. Ginger. io uses data collected (with permission) from a phone
and other sensors to assess the behavior of people with mental illnesses such as depression. Are they calling loved ones,
which a deletion on chromosome 22 causes problems such as learning and memory deficits, are building a database of information from genomic tests, clinical medical records, extensive family surveys and histories,
The goal is to create a central repository where researchers can examine multiple sources of data simultaneously.
data that once would have been locked up in one academic researcher lab will now be readily available to many different experts. o much of that data is already out there,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011