Wearables

07 Jul 23

Students Develop Low-Cost Wearable Device for the Visually Impaired

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Employing computer vision techniques, students from the Ramaiah Institute of Technology’s IEEE Computational Intelligence Society chapter in Bangalore, India, developed a device to assist people who are visually impaired. OurVision is a low-cost wearable that reads text out loud to users and helps them navigate their surroundings. The goal is…

19 Jun 23

A Wearable Robotic Assistant That’s All Over You

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.Researchers at the Small Artifacts Lab (SMART LAB) at the University of Maryland have been working on a small wearable robot called Calico. Weighing just…

14 Apr 23

Supercapacitors Get Smaller Than Ever

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

As smart devices, wearable sensors, IoT technologies, and implantable electronics shrink in size, so too should the energy-storage devices they rely on. Supercapacitors—with high capacity for energy storage but also a capability to handle rapid charge-discharge cycles that would founder a conventional chemical battery—have in recent years shrunk to “micro”…

23 Feb 23

How Smart Semiconductor Technology Will Improve Personal Health

Biotechnology & Biomedical

This sponsored article is brought to you by Infineon Technologies. We live in a world of rising population. The latest projections by the United Nations suggest that the global population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. At the same time, life expectancy is…

16 Feb 23

Stretchy Devices Spin Electricity From Body Heat

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

Phones, appliances, and humans all generate heat that usually escapes into the environment as waste energy. Thermoelectric generators, which convert temperature differences into electricity, are a way to capture that wasted heat for power.Researchers have now made a thermoelectric generator (TEG) that is soft and stretchy and that biodegrades completely…

26 Jan 23

Wearable Ultrasound Patch Images the Heart in Real Time

Biotechnology & Biomedical

A wearable ultrasound imager for the heart that is roughly the size of a postage stamp, can be worn for up to 24 hours, and works even during exercise may one day help doctors spot cardiac problems that current medical technology might miss, a new study finds.Heart disease is the…

25 Jan 23

Stacking Turns Organic Transistors Up

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Metallurgy & Material Science

Organic electronics appear to be, as the name might imply, quite good at interacting with a biological body and brain. Now scientists have created record-breaking, high-performance organic electronic devices using a potentially cheap, easy, and scalable approach that adopts a vertical architecture instead of a flat one, according to a…

13 Jan 23

Paper Batteries, Blue Quantum Dots, and Other Enabling Technologies from CES 2023

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

CES, the huge annual conference, showcase, and deal-making venue for the international consumer electronics industry, is not just about shiny new gadgets. It’s also about what’s under the hood—or at least what researchers and developers hope will be inside a whole host of devices some day.Here, in no particular order,…

11 Jan 23

CES 2023’s Four Wildest—and Catchiest—Gadgets

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

The consumer electronics world looks to CES for the next big new technology that’s going to change our daily lives. These, of course, are few and far between. We then seek out dramatic changes in existing technology, a new display, say, that will make our old televisions look dim and…

09 Jan 23

The Best Tech of CES 2023

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

CES 2023 was a successful return to form for the world’s biggest consumer electronics show after two difficult years. The time away has clearly changed the vibe of the show, which is a tad less glamorous than before. Some companies shifted to new locations, or to smaller booths, giving scrappy…