High-Tech Wristband Keeps You Cheerful

Deadline pileups, bad customer service, environmental catastrophes, crazed drivers. The next time something raises your hackles or brings you down, a high-tech wristband could get your mental state back in balance.

The W/Me wristband was created by the Mountain View startup Phyode, headed by self-described gadget junkies and medical researchers. Instead of simply monitoring behavior like sleep, steps taken or calories burned, the wristband makers say they aim to pick up the wearer’s mood and offer an interactive guide for quickly getting on track.

Each band contains a medical-grade sensor the startup developed called the life spectrum analyzer. Phyode says the components include instrumentation amplifiers, a filter chain, a precision analog-to-digital converter, a patent-pending dry conduction electrode, and a digital signal processor. This allows the device to capture and analyze electrical impulses from special cells in the right atrium, an indicator for your body’s autonomic nervous system.

Measurements are taking by touching and holding the wristband. Then the results are transmitted to an app on the user’s phone. Your mental state gets mapped out showing where you are on the passive, excitable, pessimistic and anxious spectrum. When things are really off, the app’s virtual coach, a “fitness” whale named Attu, guides you through breathing rhythms.

A few weeks ago, the company took its campaign to Kickstarter. And, as GOOD’s Meghan Neal pointed out, the W/Me got fully funded, even though there are 21 days of the $100,000 campaign still left.

Man, I could really use some technology like this for those times when it feels hard to breathe. Bad driving in particular tends to cause my jaw to clench. Those Phyode guys better prepare for lots of orders from the West because Colorado has a blinker fluid shortage.

Transparent Phone Screen Prevents Collisions

Multi-tasking on a smartphone can be dangerous, especially if it involves trying to read the screen while walking. A new application on the Android market should be a requirement for any smart device user taking to busy streets.

The free app, called Transparent Screen, is pretty self explanatory. Created by German Android application developer Sascha Affolter, the widget uses your camera to display an image of what’s going on behind your phone underneath your regular phone functions.

I took Transparent Screen for a spin on my phone around downtown Boulder, Colo. The app let me adjust the transparency level, showing more or less of the camera’s image depending on my preference.

On a sunny and cold day like today, even just seeing the regular phone screen through the glare and operating the phone with my icy fingertips was a challenge. Boulder’s sidewalks feel luxuriously giant compared to New York City, so there was plenty of time to see and avoid walking into dogs and snow banks.

In a major city, this app would certainly come in handy. You’d still need to either adjust the direction your phone is facing or glance up to avoid peripheral hazards like traffic and cyclists. However, Transparent Screen could save you from walking into posts, signs, walls, people and stepping in gross stuff like dog doo.

Using the camera does drain the battery somewhat and I found there was a slight delay in the image tracking, although that could have very well been the cold. On busy sidewalks, those tradeoffs might be well worth it for safety.

Today I noticed other people walking around Boulder with laser-like focuses on their smartphone screens. But nobody stayed like that for long. When the sun is shining and the Flatirons are dusted with snow, it’s easier to pocket the phone and enjoy the view.

Self-Assembling 4D-Printed Materials Take Shape

While the 3-D printing industry remains in a holding pattern of quasi-illegality and bombastic overexposure, some people are moving right along to the next dimension.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a so-called “4D-printing technology” that will enable macro-sized 3D-printed materials to be programmed to self-assemble into predetermined structures and shapes. The technology could potentially change the construction and manufacturing industries, making it easier to build in environments, like outer space, where extreme conditions would cause construction to be expensive and dangerous.

Led by Skylar Tibbits, director of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, the 4D-printing process involves using materials that shift shapes in response to movement or when brought into contact with water, air, gravity, magnets and/or temperature change. The fourth dimension stands for the materials’ ability to self-assemble.

In a recent TED Talk, Tibbits unveiled a new project in collaboration with 3D-printing company Stratasys.

“The idea behind 4-D printing is that you take multimaterial 3-D printing…and you add a new capability, which is transformation,” he said. “This is like robotics without wires or motors.”

Tibbits demonstrated this process by showing how a strand of 3D-printed “smart” material could fold into the letters M-I-T when placed in water. Tibbits said he believed that this was the first time a program of transformation has been directly embedded into a material itself. Researchers used Autodesk software called Project Cyborg to simulate and optimize how and when the material would fold.

“We can use the same software for the design of nano-scale self-assembly systems and human-scale self-assembly systems,” he said.

Tibbits also said the Self-Assembly Lab is working with a Boston company called Geosyntec to develop a new paradigm for infrastructure piping.

“Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate; or maybe undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves,” he said. “This isn’t  expensive pumps or valves, this is a completely programmable and adaptive pipe on its own.”

Like its three-dimensional cousin, 4-D printing is not guaranteed to take shape, but those at the Self-Assembly Lab believe the technology has capacity to revolutionize “biology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, the arts, and even space exploration.”

Wi-Fi Enables Whole House Gesture Control

If you have Microsoft’s Xbox 360 with Kinect game console (above) in your home, then you’re familiar with gesture control. Your body becomes the joystick because the device translates your movements into on-screen motion. Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone also works using gestures — just swipe your hand over the screen (without touching it) to answer an incoming call. Both of these devices use a camera or some other kind of motion-tracking sensor to capture movements and convert them into a computer command.

But now computer scientists at University of Washington have shown that it’s possible to attain gesture control with a Wi-Fi signal. According to the researchers, the “WiSee” concept is simpler and cheaper than devices such as Kinect and because Wi-Fi travels through walls, doesn’t require that the person is standing directly in front of the device that they want to control.

The team presented their technology at the 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

Google's 'Magic Ring' Could Kill the Password

Google is researching a way to kill the password, this time with a magic ring.

No, it isn’t a weird metaphorical movie plot. The idea is to use a trinket that plugs into the USB slot on a computer and authenticates the user.

At the RSA Security conference in San Francisco, Mayank Upadhyay, a principal engineer at Google who specializes in security, said the experience of logging on to a computer or website should be as simple as using an ATM machine, which is why the company is looking into the USB technology as an alternative to passwords.

Overall, passwords don’t work well for many people. That’s because people either have too many and need to write them down — violating rule number one of password security — or they have one that they use in several places, increasing their security risk.

Carrying a token could make authentication easier, because a person wouldn’t have to remember all those passwords.

Google’s prototype is a USB drive mounted on a ring or other small piece of jewelry that uses a piece of digital information knows as a cryptographic key. It’s a bit of software that serves as the encoding and decoding method for secret communications. Cryptographic keys used in computer systems are based on complicated mathematical algorithms, but their purpose is simple: encode a message so that it’s unreadable to anyone else but the intended recipient and read a coded message that’s meant only for you.

Here’s how it would work. Let’s say you want to access your checking account information from your bank’s website. First, you must register your cryptographic key with the bank. That would involve inserting the USB drive into your computer, logging onto the bank’s website and walking through a couple of authentication prompts, similar to how creating a new account works already.

During this process, two software keys get generated: one public and one private. The public key gets sent to the bank’s website for use later. The other remains stored on the USB drive.

Later, if you want to transfer money from your checking account to your savings, you visit the website with your USB key inserted in your computer. At the bank’s website, a login screen would pop up, but instead of entering your username and password, you would click a button that said “authenticate” — or even skip that step altogether. The bank uses the public crytopgraphic key created during registration to encode a message that it sends to your USB drive. That message is a mathematical “challenge” that can only be solved by the private key stored on your USB drive.

This kind of public-private key encryption is common; it relies on the fact that some mathematical operations are hard to reverse. For instance, multiplying 3 and 18 is easy to do, but factoring out the result — 54 — into the smallest possible prime numbers (1, 3, 3, 3, and 2) is harder, because you have to do more mathematical steps. Encrypting a message with the public key is like multiplying the two numbers, and the decryption process is like factoring the result and looking for two specific numbers. If you want to decode the message without the key, you don’t know if the numbers you want are 2 and 3, 3 and 3, or 1 and 3, or possibly some other combination like 6 and 9. That’s what makes this kind of cryptography work so well — a big number has billions of possible combinations of factors.

Because a user is not typing in a password, she is safe from hackers who may be using  software that records keystrokes to steal her login information. And a cryptographic key also deals with “man in the middle” hacks, which involve someone monitoring the digital communications between a user and a website and stealing that information to be used later.

A magic ring certainly deals with the problem of password hacks, but it doesn’t necessarily address what happens if the user loses the USB drive. Of what happen if an unscrupulous person got a hold of the ring, he’d most likely be able to access secured websites, assuming he had enough information such as the user’s name. On the bright side, in this sense it is similar to losing your house or car keys — if someone finds your house keys, they can’t break into your home without knowing the address.

It does offer some neat ideas for a modern take on the “Lord of the Rings” movie, though. Would it involve a quest to drop a USB ring into an incinerator?

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Via Technology Review

World's Thinnest Camera Sees a Single Cell

The endoscope radically changed medicine; doctors were able to use a tiny camera at the end of a thread-thin wire to look into a patient’s body without major surgery. Engineers at Stanford University have taken the endoscope a step further: they’ve built the thinnest one ever and it see individual cells.

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Their needle-thin endoscope has the potential to image single cancer cells and peer into organs where larger endoscopes could do more damage than good, like in the brain. And the super thin endoscope would create a much smaller scar than a laparoscope, the instrument typically used to do knee surgery.

Conventional endoscopes are built with multiple optical fibers, some of which illuminate the area and others which record the image and carry it back to the viewer. The more fibers inside the endoscope, the better the resolution of the image. But more fibers also translates into a bulkier endoscope.

Kahn’s team built a endoscope using just one multimode fiber. Multimode fibers are capable of carrying light along many different paths — in fact, a “mode” is a path that light takes. The team’s idea was to use a single fiber to both illuminate an object as well as carry data from the image. The challenge is the information gets scrambled on the way, since the light is moving along different paths.

To make it work, Kahn’s team built a device called a spatial light modulator. The modulator sent a continuous beam of laser light down the fiber in random paths. Because of the random path, once the light exited the fiber it made a speckled pattern. Some of that light bounced back up the fiber.

A computer program created by Kahn’s team analyzed the speckled pattern returning up the fiber and used that to build an image. Their technique pushed the resolution of the image even further than what they had expected, and enabled them to see object that were sizes of individual cells.

Kahn said in a press release that he sees most of the new applications in imaging, to study in detail cells as they operate inside the body.

Sound Waves Focused Into Laserlike Beam

We’ve all seen laser beams — narrow and powerful beams of light used in everything from CD players to weapons. Now researchers have found a way to make sound waves that, like light waves in a laser, travel in step. They call it a phaser and it could open up applications as wide-ranging as precision timer circuits and better ultrasound scans.

The researchers from NTT Basic Laboratories in Japan call their device a phaser because it uses phonons, waves of sound that require a medium, such as a gas, liquid or solid, to travel.

To create the beam, they started with a tiny drum just a few nanometers across, and put it inside a cavity, which acted like a resonator. They vibrated the drum, which transmitted energy to the cavity, and created the phonons. The cavity confined the sound waves. At a certain frequency, called the resonant frequency, the material of the cavity relaxed in a very specific way, creating vibrations that transferred energy back into the drum. Those vibrations are at a specific frequency and if one connected the resonator to a solid material those vibrations would travel away in a narrow beam. That traveling wave is the “laser” sound beam. Since the sound waves are all in step with each other, they would go in straight lines and wouldn’t spread out.

Right now the device is confined to a circuit a half an inch on a side. And it can’t send out beams of sound over a distance, like the sonic weapons used in crowd control or against Somali pirates. That’s because in order for phonons to travel, they need the gas, liquid or solid they’re moving through to be consistent that entire way.

Although the word “phaser” is used to mean a laser-like weapon on the science fiction television show and movie Star Trek, it doesn’t mean that here. But like lasers, phasers end up in common use. For example a resonator could translate the beams of phonon vibrations into electrical signals, replacing the quartz crystals currently used in watches and clocks. And the high frequencies mean that it could provide a better picture than current ultrasound systems.