A radio without any knobs. A bathroom where a clear display wirelessly streams vital statistics on your health. And a user interface that takes brain waves and translates them into commands for a computer.
These are some of the products in development by Cambridge Consultants, a product design and development company. It showed off some of its latest inventions at a daylong event last week in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Check out these sweet ideas, many of which are set to hit retail shelves in the next few weeks.
Cube Radio (above)
As devices become more complex to use, designers are striving for simplicity in form. The Q2 Cube internet radio tries to innovate in terms of how users can interact with it. It’s the first dial-free radio, say Cambridge Consultants and the Armour Group, which co-developed it. The cube-shaped device lets users choose radio stations or change the volume by moving the device itself. To select one of the four pre-set radio stations, turn the Cube onto one of its ‘faces.’ Tilting it forward turns the volume up, and tilting it backwards turns it down. The device took about nine months to develop from concept to prototype.
Though pricing for it has not yet been announced, the Cube is expected to be available in some retail stores in the U.K. in time for Christmas.
Implantable Antenna
Patient care is set to go beyond the doctor’s office. New low-power wireless technologies make it possible to implant monitoring devices in people’s bodies, to help keep an eye on blood pressure, metabolism and other vital statistics.
But one of the challenges of these new wireless devices is designing a suitable antenna that can operate within the human body where fat, muscle and skin tissue create challenging conditions for wireless signals.
This implantable antenna uses the 402-405MHz Medical Implant Communications Service (MICS) frequency band. Combined with a custom integrated chip or a system on a chip, device makers can use the antenna in pacemakers, neurostimulation devices, and swallowable imaging and diagnostic systems.
Connected Patient
There’s no dearth of health and fitness equipment, from the basic digital scale to sophisticated heart and blood pressure monitors. But most of these devices work independently with no easy way to share the data or discern patterns in it.
Now picture the bathroom of the future, where these devices can talk to each other and wirelessly stream information onto a single screen. It’s easy to do it with the Bluetooth Health Device Profile and the IEEE Personal Health Data specification.
In the past, communication between medical devices was based on ad-hoc and proprietary standards, which offered limited or no interoperability. The latest Bluetooth and IEEE standards developed specifically for medical use changes that. For a user, it means, a better overall picture of your fitness and medical information.
The photo to the left shows an example of non-volatile, flexible organic flash memory developed at the University of Toyko–something that could lead the way to a slew of flexible computing gadgets, such as large-area sensors and electronic paper devices, Engadget reports.
