High school student creates a smart wearable for Parkinson’s patients

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OneRing monitors motor distortions and generates patient reports.

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After school activities for the average high school student typically entails sports practices, music lessons and homework; but creating a smart medical device for a disease that affects 10 million people seems unlikely. That’s not the case for Cupertino High School sophomore Utkarsh Tandon. Tandon is the founder of OneRing, an intelligent tool for monitoring Parkinson’s disease.

OneRing is a wearable that captures movement data from a patient, algorithmically identifies Parkinson’s tremor patterns and classifies the severity. Tandon first became interested in studying the disease when he watched a video of Muhammad Ali, who has Parkinson’s, light the Olympic torch in 1996. After volunteering at a local Parkinson’s institute, the 15-year-old decided to build a company that focuses on improving the lives of those affected by this movement disorder. He began working on signal processing and machine learning algorithms, before evolving the concept and founded OneRing.

OneRing quantifies Parkinson’s disease movements and its mobile app leverages the data collected to generate smart patient reports that physicians can use to better prescribe medication. At the core of the device is its machine learning technology. The OneRing has been trained to model various Parkinson’s motor patterns such as dyskinesia, bradykinesia and tremors. A Bluetooth module encased inside the 3D-printed plastic ring allows it to communicate with its accompanying iOS app to provide time-stamped analytics about the patient’s movement severity during the day.

The ring itself currently comes in three sizes, each varying in diameter: 18mm, 19mm and 20 mm. Tandon and his team hope to develop a “one-size-fits-all” piece in the near future.

With this Kickstarter campaign, Tandon hopes to deploy OneRing to a local Parkinson’s institute where the device can be used in exams and sent home with patients. Ultimately he wants to bring OneRing to patients all around the world in hopes of suppressing the condition’s rapid progression. Interested in the cause? Head over to the OneRing project page, where Tandon and his team have already doubled their pledged goal of $1,500.

Meet the world’s first smart fingerprint padlock

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With TAPP, you no longer have to worry about lost keys or forgotten combination codes.

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Padlocks are great for securing your belongings, but they’re a hassle to deal with if you lose the keys or forget the combination code. And with a quick search online, anyone can learn how to pick a lock. Not very useful anymore, is it? Well, the team at Pishon Labs has a 21^st century solution to this problem.

Meet TAPP, the smart access padlock that opens with your unique fingerprint, no key or combination code needed. The Toronto-based team came up with TAPP because they feel that traditional units are inconvenient and outdated.

TAPP uses a cutting edge encrypted fingerprint sensor, and grants access with just a tap in 0.8 seconds. Have you accessed a lock any faster? Unlike other padlocks, TAPP has a built-in alarm that will activate if the lock is cut or if anyone without authorization tries to open it. Or if you want to grant access to certain people, the accompanying app will let you authorize up to 200 fingerprints. You can even customize the time, location and duration of access. TAPP can be used for multiple purposes because it’s water resistant and can withstand rain and snow.

There are two versions of TAPP available. TappLock has a lithium-ion battery, which can last up to three years on one charge, while TappLock Lite is equipped with a replaceable battery that can last up to six months. Both have Bluetooth 4.1. integration, allowing you to use your phone as the key to your lock and to receive real-time updates on its remaining battery life.

Interested? Head over to TAPP’s Indiegogo page, where the Pishon Lab team has already doubled their goal of $40,000. Delivery is expected for Nov. 2016.

Humans can now be bioluminescent with this LED implant

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The Northstar V1 is the latest device biohackers are implanting under their skin.

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There are wearables… and then there are embeddables. The latter is technology you can’t necessarily take off because it’s implanted in your body under the skin. This seems extreme for most people, but not for a group biohackers who recently implanted a coin-sized LED device in their hands.

The Northstar V1 is the latest subdermal technology implant created by Grindhouse Wetware, a Pittsburgh-based collective comprised of biohackers and grinders. For those unfamiliar with the term, grinders are people who are part human, part machine and they share the mission of “augmenting humanity using safe, affordable, open source technology.”

The Northstar is a module with five red LEDs that light up for 10 seconds when activated by a magnet, illuminating the user’s skin. While a light up implantable doesn’t sound too appealing and worth cutting up your hand for, co-founder Tim Cannon says the Northstar is designed to show that things can be inserted safely and be usable under the skin.

The Northstar is coated with Parylene, which is employed in biotech to prevent the body’s rejection of the device. At the heart of it is an ATmega28P. A limitation to the unit, however, is its power. The implant runs on a CR2325 lithium coin cell and is not rechargeable. However, the Grindhouse team believes this simple gadget will pave the way for a more advance and functional Northstar V2 that will be rechargeable, have gesture recognition, Bluetooth capabilities and even deliver biometric data.

At the moment, V1 is purely for aesthetic purposes and has gained interest from the body modification community as a way to backlight body art. If you’re interested in becoming a cyborg, visit Cannon and the Grindhouse Wetware’s website.

[Images: Ryan O’Shea/Grindhouse Wetware]

Wearable sweat sensors provide real-time analysis of the body

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UC Berkeley engineers have developed new wearable sensors that can measure skin temperature, as well as glucose, lactate, sodium and potassium in sweat.

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As it turns out, future wearable devices may not be as interested in your activities, as they are the sweat produced during them. That’s because engineers at UC Berkeley have developed a flexible sensor system capable of measuring metabolites and electrolytes in sweat and sending the results to a smartphone in real-time.

According to researchers, these bendable plastic patches can be easily implemented into bands for the wrist and head, and provide early warnings to health problems such as fatigue and dangerously high temperatures.

“Human sweat contains physiologically rich information, thus making it an attractive body fluid for non-invasive wearable sensors,” explained Ali Javey, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences.

The prototype consists of five sensors and a flexible circuit with (what would appear to be an Atmel) MCU and a Bluetooth transceiver. This board measures the concentration of various chemicals in sweat and skin temperature, calibrates the information and then sends it over to its accompanying mobile app.

To test their proof-of-concept, the engineers put the device and more than two dozen volunteers through various indoor and outdoor exercises, such as riding stationary bikes and running trails. In doing so, the team kept tabs on sodium, potassium, glucose and lactate. Monitoring electrolytes like sodium and potassium may help track conditions,  and can ultimately be utilized to assess a user’s state of health.

“When studying the effects of exercise on human physiology, we typically take blood samples. With this non-invasive technology, someday it may be possible to know what’s going on physiologically without needle sticks or attaching little, disposable cups on you,” added physiologist George Brooks, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology.

Intrigued? Learn all about the wearable sweat sensor here, or watch the team’s video below!

‘Sup Brow? Send a message to your friend by making a muscle

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Text a friend by lifting your eyebrow using a MyoWare muscle sensor and an Adafruit Bluefruit Feather board. 

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In today’s world, there are all kinds of ways to message one another. There’s texting, emailing, Skyping, Snapchatting, and countless other forms of communication. But what if you could send a message to your friend by simply raising your eyebrow?

This was something Adafruit’s Becky Stern and Kate Hartman wanted to make a reality in their recent wearables project, ’Sup Brows. To bring this idea to life, the duo employed a MyoWare muscle sensor along with a Feather Bluefruit 32U4 LE (ATmega32U4) microcontroller to transmit a signal through the phone to Adafruit IO and then IFTTT to trigger an SMS.

“It’s really neat to use non-verbal communication like facial expressions as an interface for electronics,” Hartman explains.

As cool of a project as this may be, ‘Sup Brows is simply the beginning. Since it’s connected to IFTTT, the possibilities of what you can accomplish by creating a recipe and just raising your eyebrows are endless. Similarly, Stern and Hartman note that it can also be hooked up to a variety of other muscles to have activities prompted by other facial expressions, gestures and actions.

So whether it’s booking an appointment with your cosmetic surgeon when your Botox wears off or getting yourself out of a date with a butt dial, everything is fair game. Intrigued? Head over to Adafruit’s tutorial page to get started.

 

Meet the drone that flies, floats and swims underwater

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The Loon Copter looks like something out of James Bond.

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It’s in our nature to be curious, so it comes with no surprise that there have been a lot of excitement surrounding commercial drones. Drones open up the skies for ordinary people to explore the land from above and if the history of human innovation has taught us anything, it’s that we have the tendency take something great and make it even better. Researchers from Oakland University’s Embedded Systems Research Laboratory have done just with Loon Copter, the first aerial and underwater drone.

Fittingly named after the aquatic bird, the Loon Copter is a multi-rotor platform capable of traditional aerial flight, on-water surface operation and sub aquatic diving. The Michigan-based research team of Dr. Osamah Rawashdeh, Sean Simpson, Hamzeh Alzubi and Iyad Mansour started this project in 2014 and demonstrated successful operation in early 2015.

The Loon Copter has the body of a conventional quadcopter, but the cylinder that hangs below the air frame is what truly gives it the unique capabilities. The cylinder, when filled with air, changes the drone’s bouyancy so it can transition from flight to floating on water. The cylinder also can fill up with water and sink, allowing the drone to dive. The four propellers used for flying in the air, is also for navigating in the water. The drone can seamlessly return to flight by pumping out the water. Sounds like something out of a James Bond movie right? It’s not too far-fetched as the Loon Copter’s design can be adapted for search and rescue applications, or marine research.

The Loon Copter is one of the 10 international semifinalists in the 2016 Drones for Good competition, which received 1,017 entries from 165 countries. Dr. Rawashdeh and his team will be in Dubai from February 4-6, 2016 competing for the grand prize of $1 million. Learn more about the Loon Copter and the team’s work by visiting their website.

It’s never been so easy to build your own Arduino-based quadcopter

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The YMFC-3D V2 flight controller enables everyone to create their own Arduino drone. 

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Quadcopters, or “drones” as they are sometimes inaccurately known, seem to be getting a lot of attention currently. There are, of course, many off-the-shelf components to control your flying contraption, but if a stock flight controller (FC) isn’t geeky enough, you can always turn an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) into one.

That’s exactly what Joop Brokking has done. As the creator puts it, “I made the YMFC-3D [Your Multicopter Flight Controller] V2 flight controller software so everybody can build their own Arduino quadcopter and having a great learning experience.”

The video below explains things nicely, but to summarize, his Arduino software is divided into three sketches that attempt to automate much of the configuration procedure. First, a setup program is loaded into the Uno, which outputs specific steps for the user to go through to set up the transmitter and gyroscope. Next, a separate program is employed to help calibrate the electronic speed controllers, commonly known as ESCs, that directly power the motors. Finally, the actual FC program is loaded into the Arduino, so you can actually test out and fly your ‘copter.

For more information, as well as source code, you’ll want to check out Brokking’s website. He also has information there on his earlier version, which is meant for those already experienced with radio controlled flight and the Arduino.

One neat thing about a build like this is that, in theory, one could program the Uno to do all kinds of tricks, like control an LED strip while in flight or turn a servo. This concept could, it would seem, even be expanded to maneuver other kinds of RC vehicles. On the other hand, one would need to be careful not to tie up too much processing power and quite literally “crash” your system!

 

Fabulous Beasts is like Jenga with an IoT twist

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Fabulous Beasts is a game of strategy and balance in which you build a tower of animals on your tabletop, then help them evolve in a connected digital world.

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Video games have come a long way in the past several years, yet they’ve also increased children’s fascination with screened devices. And unfortunately, alternatives like board and card games seem to lack the high-tech pizzazz kids are looking for these days. This was a problem London-based studio Sensible Object wanted to solve.

Fabulous Beasts is the startup’s first game, which combines the physical interaction of old-school fun with today’s digital savviness. Inspired by the Internet of Things, players take turns in constructing a Jenga-like tower by balancing multi-colored, animal-shaped blocks on top of each other.

Similar to popular games like Disney Infinity and Skylanders, Fabulous Beasts is hoping to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds, all while creating a deeper and more dynamic experience for the younger generation.

The game itself is made for one to five players, each of whom become “gods” ruling over an app-connected world, visible on any phone or tablet over Bluetooth. Before each turn, players scan their RFID-embedded game pieces, also known as “Beast Artefacts,” via a reader and then place them atop the stack. As this happens, the animals will appear on the mobile device, and evolve and augment in interesting ways.

As time goes on, the tower becomes taller and more complex, and consequently worth more points. The objective is get the highest score (or fabulousness) before the tower eventually falls down. Once this occurs, just like Jenga, the game comes to an end.

What’s more, Fabulous Beasts is a fine example of a project that has transcended from beyond the MakerSpace and into the MarketPlace, having originally prototyped with 3D printing and Arduino. The studio is now launching a crowdfunding campaign to draw attention from the public.

Sound like a game for you and your children? Head over to its Kickstarter campaign, where the Sensible Object crew is currently seeking $214,582. Delivery is expected to get underway in November 2016.

This giant drone lifted a record-setting weight of 134 pounds

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One team of students from Norway built a massive Megacopter that set the record for the heaviest payload lifted by a remote-controlled drone.

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The University of Oslo’s Department of Informatics has aspirations of one day using drones to transport people. (Not unlike the Ehang team, which debuted its person-carrying, helicopter-ish aerial vehicle at CES 2016.) Taking a step closer to a Jetsons-like future, one team of students led by Henning Pedersen has developed a giant aircraft which has set a new Guinness World Record for lifting the heaviest payload by a remote-controlled ‘copter.

The aptly named Megacopter is essentially a series of several small drones attached to a larger frame comprised of aluminum and plywood. There are a total of 48 motors and 13 propellers arranged in eight groups, as well as 24 LiPo batteries. A separate onboard controller kicks in if signal from the pilot is lost in order to help it float back down to the ground.

As you can see in the video below, large exercise balls were used as landing feet. Meanwhile, gyroscopes and accelerometers were employed as motor control and horizontal stabilizers.

A limited battery capacity gave the team five attempts to lift the weight, with the first two tries unsuccessful in achieving the 30-second minimum. Eventually, the Megacopter was able to raise its 134-pounds and 7.6-ounce load in the air for 37 seconds to claim its stake in the record books.

According to its creators, the drone only flies for three to six minutes but they hope to extend that time by adding more batteries in the near future. Currently, the Megacopter is registered to heft up to 330.5 pounds, but it is unknown for how long or how high.

 

SmartyPans is like a Fitbit for food

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SmartyPans is a Bluetooth-enabled skillet that calculates nutrition information of home cooked meals, in real-time.

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Are you the type of person who dines out every night because you don’t know how to cook or agonizes about the nutritional contents of your food with every bite? If so, those worries may be a thing of the past thanks to SmartyPans — an intelligent frying pan, which not only helps you whip up a meal but keeps tabs on what you consume as well.

SmartyPans enables anyone to make dinner like a chef, while tracking their intake like a pro. The cooking system is comprised of two parts: the connected skillet and an accompanying recipe app. It uses the combination of voice commands, weight and temperature sensors along with the app to provide you with real-time nutritional information about the food you’re preparing.

To get started, you tell the app what ingredients you’re adding to the pan. The app then employs those commands and its sensors to calculate calories and other nutritional data. What’s more, you can input those numbers into some of today’s most popular health and fitness platforms, like MyFitnessPal, Google Fit and Fitbit, as well as share your favorite recipes with friends and family.

In terms of electronics, SmartyPans features an Atmel | SMART Cortex-M4 MCU at its core, Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity and a rechargeable 800mAh battery. The pan itself boasts a unique design with an NSF-grade aluminum outer layer and a detachable inner cooking surface. This modularity allows you to use the top portion as a serving bowl and oven pan, or the entire thing as a kitchen scale.

Are you ready to cook with freedom and track with ease? Head over to SmartyPans’ Indiegogo campaign, where the brother-sister duo of Prachi and Rahul Baxi are currently seeking $40,000. The must-have accessory will come in red, black and orange along with the option of stainless steel or a ceramic non-stick coating. Delivery is slated for August 2016.