Wearable Computers Make a Fashion Statement

A wearable computing trend is at the heart of the "quantified self" movement in which people track anything from how many calories they burn to how well they sleep or their moods at any given moment.

The notion of being fashionably smart is getting a makeover as internet-linked computers get woven into formerly brainless attire such as glasses, bracelets and shoes. A wearable computing trend is at the heart of the "quantified self" movement in which people track anything from how many calories they burn to how well they sleep or their moods at any given moment.

"We are heading for the wearable computing era," Gartner analyst Van Baker told AFP. "People are going to be walking around with personal area networks on their bodies and have multiple devices that talk to each other and the Web."

Google Glass and other augmented reality projects are about to break onto the scene. But what does an augmented reality look like and how can it enhance our lives.

Understandably, the trend has found traction in fitness with devices such as the Jawbone UP, Nike's FuelBand, and Fitbit keeping tabs on whether people are leading active, healthy lifestyles. The devices use sensors to detect micro movements and then feed information to smartphones or tablets, where applications tap into processing power to analyze data and provide feedback to users.

San Francisco-based Jawbone jumped into wearable computing years ago, building electronic brains into stylish wireless earpieces and speakers for smartphones. Jawbone recently added muscle to its lineup of fitness lifestyle devices with a deal to buy BodyMedia.

BodyMedia makes armbands used to track caloric burn of fat-shedding competitors on US reality television show "The Biggest Loser." "There's an enormous appetite for personal data and self-discovery among consumers that will only continue to grow," said Jawbone chief executive and founder Hosain Rahman.

A Forrester Research survey conducted early this year found that six percent of US adults wore a gadget to track performance in a sport, while five percent used a gadget like UP or Fitbit to track daily activity or how well they sleep. Worldwide shipments of wearable computing devices could climb as high as 30 million units this year, according to Forrester.

Tiny 3D-Printed Microbattery Offers Big Power

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An interlaced stack of electrodes was printed layer-by-layer to create the working anode and cathode of a microbattery.

Good new, techies: 3-D printers can now do more than make dust-collecting doodads. Researchers have developed a method of producing powerful microbatteries using these trendy contraptions.

Developed by a team of researchers at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, these lithium-ion microbatteries are no bigger than a grain of sand but hold as much energy as their much larger counterparts.

"The electrochemical performance is comparable to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy density," said Shen Dillon, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We're just able to achieve this on a much smaller scale."

To create the microbatteries, researchers used a custom-built 3-D printer to stack electrodes -- each one less than the width of a human hair -- along the teeth of two tiny gold combs. The electrodes were contained within a special ink, extruded from the printer's narrow nozzles and applied to the combs like toothpaste being squeezed onto a toothbrush.

The electrode inks, one serving as a cathode, the other as an anode, hardened immediately into narrow layers, one atop the other. Once the electrodes were stacked, researchers packaged them inside tiny containers and added an electrolyte solution to complete the battery pack.

This novel process created a battery that could one day help power tiny medical implants as well as more novel electronics, like flying,insect-like robots. Such devices have been in development for some time, patiently awaiting an appropriately sized power source.

"[The researchers'] innovative microbattery ink designs dramatically expand the practical uses of 3-D printing, and simultaneously open up entirely new possibilities for miniaturization of all types of devices, both medical and non-medical," said Donald Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Jennifer Lewis, a professor of engineering at Harvard University and lead author of the microbattery research study, said her team is looking at using their novel 3-D printing process to create other precise structures with diverse electronic, optical, mechanical or biologically relevant properties.

Tiny Channels Take Salt From Seawater

Drinking water is a vital need in many parts of the world, and one method of getting it is desalination, which is just taking the salt out of seawater. But the plants require either lots of energy or special filters — and both of those things are costly.

Now there’s a possible workaround: a system of tiny channels, built into a chip, that pulls the salt out of the water with little energy and no need for filter technologies that are difficult to make and maintain.

That would be a huge boon to areas where water is scarce, but seawater isn’t. The largest desalination plant is in Saudi Arabia, and some Caribbean islands depend on it. Both locales need a lot of energy to run the plants, though. The world Health Organization says about a billion people around the world have no access to safe water. Many of those people live in arid coastal regions in Africa and the Middle East.

Richard M. Crooks at the University of Texas at Austin and Ulrich Tallarek at the University of Marburg, Germany, developed the idea. They forced salty water down a channel that splits into two branches. Each of the smaller channels was about 22 microns wide. The two small channels were connected to an electrode that juts into the point where they branch.

Then they applied just 3 volts to the electrode. The voltage changes some of the chloride ions, which have negative charges, into neutral chlorine. This has the effect of increasing the electric field strength and making a gradient across the two channels. That gradient forces ions into one channel, while the fresh water flows down the other.

The whole system is cheaper than filters because it won’t get clogged, and it uses a lot less energy than current desalination systems.

The two scientists are developing the technology with a startup, Okeanos Technologies, and presented their work in the journal Angewandte Chemie

Mini Camera Gets A Big Brain

Cameras are mounted everywhere in sports these days. During the Olympics we had underwater cams for swimmers and athlete's-eye views for bikes. Now there's a camera that could be mounted on a helmet to record not just the athlete's view but her heart rate, acceleration and loction, too.

Called the INCA, the camera has a processor as powerful as any PC, which allows a lot of functionality crammed into a space less than  three inches on a side. The INCA was designed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS.

Wear Your Data with the Safety Pin Flash Drive (Photos)

It never hurts to have a flash drive nearby.

These drives come in a variety of forms that make them easy to transport (ever look at a techie’s keys?). Art Lebedev has created a clever and functional form for the USB drive: a safety pin. Yes, you can wear your data.

Smart design — just don’t forget to remove it before the pants go in the wash. No word on whether this is ruggardized.