Intelligence in everything

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Hi-tech beermats for 21st Century

Last Updated: Friday, 30 September 2005, 15:18 GMT 16:18 UK

An intelligent beermat that alerts the bartender that your glass is empty could feature in pubs of the future.

Like an ordinary mat, it absorbs drips; but the gadget also has hidden sensors.

The device will detect the weight of the drink above it, working out how much is left before sending a signal to the bar for a refill.

The coaster can also tell which way up it is, and whether it's moving around. The creators think the mat could be used for voting in pub games.

This might be handy in a karaoke bar, for example, where the audience has to decide whether the performer should continue or stop.

"If they just raise their glass, that's a positive vote; if they raise their glass and flip over the beer mat, that's a negative vote," explained Professor Andreas Butz, at the University of Munich, Germany.

He supervised two students - Matthias Hahnen and Robert Doerr - as they developed their concept for an everyday object that could be enriched by computers.

Given the reputation of students, it was perhaps no surprise the pair - one is a product-design student, the other a computer scientist - had the idea of a beermat containing embedded circuitry.

"It has two sensors - one that can measure the weight of a glass that's resting on it, and a gravity sensor so it can know whether it's flipped upside down," explained Professor Butz.

"You can distinguish a lot of weight as a full glass, a little weight as an empty glass - no weight means somebody has lifted their glass."

When drinks are low, a blinking light at the bar could let the waiter know to check that table for a top-up.

Because the mat can also sense being picked up and flapped around, customers can signal an order - with the urgency judged by the speed it is moved.

Another feature is that drinkers can say how many drinks they would like to order by stacking of a number of mats in one hand.

The final design consists of a flat, cylindrical body, which contains the electronics; and a rectangular recess on the top that holds a conventional cardboard beermat.

The present cost to make a single mat is around US$100 (£60), but this would be around 10 times cheaper if they went into mass production, say the students who work out of Saarland University.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4298344.stm

Too Smart to Ever Need a Doc

Not the best looking thing but things will improve when better designers start using the tech. But still very useful even tho it doesn't look all that nice.

Who would have ever thought that clothing manufacturers would find a way to give everyday garb a dual responsibility? Well they have, and instead of the Joneses, it seems we'll all soon be keeping up with the Jetsons.

With the recent release of the "Smart Shirt," owners can skip their visit to the doctors and have their T-Shirt monitor their heart rate, EKG, temperature, and other important vital signs. The "Smart Shirt" can then transmit this data to a doctor or tell the wearer of any abnormalities in their vital signs.

As the latest invention on the garment market, "Smart Shirts" come in the form of nanotechnology, which is regarded by manufacturers as "the most innovative development to happen in the clothing industry over the past 50 years."

The "Smart Shirt" is made of special lightweight fabrics and has ultra thin fiber optics and sensors. This new technology in the garment industry was first explored in 1996 by Georgia Tech on a grant from the Department of Defense (DOD) to examine ways to monitor and track soldiers on the battlefield.

New Shades Battle Boiling Brains

Your next pair of sunglasses could do much more than shield your eyes from ultraviolet rays. They could tell you how hot your brain is and even prevent heatstroke.

An advanced sensor patch built into the nosepiece of GMI Medical Instrumentation's new TechXtreme sunglasses monitors the wearer's brain-temperature level, and the results are streamed wirelessly to a numerical display on a sports watch. The sunglasses could save the lives of athletes, construction workers and anyone else who faces the risk of heatstroke.

We've created a product that won't be just another fashion accessory, but will hopefully save some lives, too," said Roger Titone, assistant director of research and development at GMI Medical. "That's an awesome possibility."

The shades take advantage of Yale University researcher Marc Abreu's discoveries about an area of the brain he calls the "brain temperature tunnel." It connects the thermal storage area of the brain to a small patch of skin in the corner of each eye, adjacent to the nose.

The brain temperature tunnel provides a direct and undisturbed source of thermal conduction from the brain to the surface of the skin, according to Abreu's research, and is the only area in the human body where the skin is free of fat. These characteristics allow the sensor patch of the glasses to supply noninvasive measurement of core body temperature.

"In the context of anatomy, you can almost call it a perfect storm," said Titone. "There's abundant blood flow because of the concentration of arteries and veins, and a lot of other factors in play that make heat transfer so efficient in this area."

The watch has two alarms that alert a wearer if his or her body temperature reaches extreme levels. The sunglass frame incorporates a reed switch, which powers down the circuitry when the earpieces are folded, giving it a battery life of up to 700 hours. The sunglasses and watch will be available at braintemperaturetunnel.com in three to five months.

The same technology that drives the TechXtreme glasses has proven to be so reliable that it has been used to monitor body temperature in patients during surgery. "It's been used very successfully in investigational research at Yale," Titone said, in reference to Abreu's continuing quest to expand upon medical uses for his discovery.

GMI also intends to integrate the technology into other applications, including a cooling mattress that could offer relief to patients in burn wards. Climate-control systems for automobiles also could be commanded by brain temperature tunnel data, activating air conditioning or heating systems according to the driver's core temperature.

Heat stroke is a serious risk for firefighters, athletes and construction workers who are often required to exert themselves under extreme temperature conditions. Brain temperatures can rise to dangerous levels before detection and intervention are possible.

Chauncey Naylor and his team at Williams Fire & Hazard Control in Vidor, Texas, fight raging flammable-liquid fires, and their success in the business is world-renowned.

"At the moment, we take a preventative approach (to heat exhaustion), and try to keep everyone hydrated," Naylor said. "Sometimes, it's unbelievable how many people we have on a fire, so we try to rotate these individuals and keep them comfortable. Without a doubt, this kind of temperature monitoring could be extremely useful for us, especially if it could be built in to safety glasses."

Elevated brain temperatures and heat stroke can have a wide range of clinical results, from cognitive impairment and loss of judgment to serious brain damage or death. Athletic performance can also deteriorate, since blood functions as the body's natural coolant. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found in a 23-year study that heat-related deaths exceeded loss of life caused by hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined.

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,6...w=wn_tophead_4#

Clever clothes pegs check the weather

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The frustration of hanging clean washing out to dry, only for it to pour down with rain soon after, may be over, thanks to weather-predicting pegs that tell you if your clothes will get wet.

Designed by Oliver MacCarthy, 22, the pegs were part of his final year project for his product design degree at Brunel University, in west London.

Each peg sits inside a peg holder, which is fitted with a digital barometer that checks pressure in the air every hour and is able to tell whether rain is on its way.

If the holder detects rain, it sends a small electric signal to a metallic plate inside the base of the holder.

Parts of the pegs have a metallic coating, which enables them to communicate with the electrical currents on the plate.

If the peg is removed from the holder and the holder predicts rain, the peg locks itself shut, preventing clothes from being hung out.

However, the pegs would not lock themselves shut if the forecast changed for the worse and they were already on the line, MacCarthy told CNN.

Two symbols on the outside of the holder, one that indicates "clear sky" and another that shows "rain," also help predict what will happen with the weather.

MacCarthy said he came up with the idea because he wanted to incorporate technology into a solution for an everyday problem.

"I wanted to take a fresh look at something that we all use regularly. I thought of clothes pegs because so often I'd hang washing out, only to take it in again five minutes later, absolutely soaked," he said.

"These intelligent clothes pegs are, I hope, a fun solution to an all too common problem. Never again will people have to worry about whether or not to hang their clothes out."

At the moment the weather-predicting pegs are not commercially available but MacCarthy said he hoped they one day would be, and believed there would be huge demand for such a product.

Design director of Brunel's School of Engineering and Design Paul Turnock said: "Oliver has very cleverly taken a well established consumer item and re-designed it to be an intelligent, user-friendly device that could be in our shops in tomorrow's hi-tech world."

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/09/12/spark.pegs/

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