Hasta La Gadget!

CO2 Structure sample undergoes a compressive stress test at Tokyo Denki University.

As Japan works to repair the damage caused by the recent earthquake and tsunami, a newly discovered alternative to concrete may make structures stronger in a fraction of the time.

Japanese architectural design office TIS & Partners created CO2 Structure, a building material that supersedes brick and concrete in many ways. When combined with epoxy or urethane, CO2 Structure is twice as strong as regular concrete. While normal gray concrete takes up to 28 days to harden fully, CO2 Structure is ready within 24 hours. It can support structures with almost no steel reinforcement.

The 8.9-magnitude tremor that struck 250 miles northeast of Tokyo triggered a tsunami that hit Japan’s Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures with 7-foot waves. With damages estimated at over $300 billion, the CO2 Structure’s quick hardening will likely be an asset in reconstruction in Japan, and anywhere else prone to earthquakes and aftershocks.

“Areas that underwent subsidence in the East Japan Earthquake could be reinforced using this material,” said Norihide Imagawa, president of TIS & Partners,
in an interview with DigInfo TV. Imagawa said structures built with CO2 Structure could have a lifespan of at least 50 years.

CO2 Structure will make its debut on September 25 when Tokyo Denki University students and TIS & Partners begin construction on a dome outside the UIA World Congress at the Tokyo International Forum.

The quarter-sized energy harvester is small enough for use in car tires and home appliances. (Photo courtesy MicroGen Systems)

By drawing energy from vibrations, tiny sheets of piezoelectric material can provide free power to anything that moves or shakes. The battery-less sensors can take the motion from a car on bumpy asphalt or a loaded clothes dryer, for example, to give supplemental energy to a device.

The piezoelectric unit in motion from a 60 Hz vibration. (Photo courtesy Cornell University)

Piezoelectric technology has been around since the late 19^th century and can be found in microphones and phonographs working under simple principles. Under kinetic stress, crystals on a sheet of piezoelectric material become electrically polarized, which produces energy.

The new sensors, developed by MicroGen Systems and Cornell University researchers at the school’s NanoScale Facility, pair with a thin-film battery to apply the same principles, giving a boost to any attached device.

Unfortunately, a vibration-only drive in a Nissan Leaf from L.A. to New York isn’t an option. The piezoelectric system produces only 200 microwatts of energy, but the added juice could reduce drain on our gadgets’ precious power supply.

Bioengineering doctoral student Kate Balaconis shines the iPhone reader against her tattooless arm.

Maybe tattoos aren’t just for Harley riders or rebellious teens after all. In a few years, diabetics might get inked up with digital tats that communicate with an iPhone to monitor their blood.

Instead of the dye used for tribal arm bands and Chinese characters, these tattoos will contain nanosensors that read the wearer’s blood levels of sodium, glucose and even alcohol with the help of an iPhone 4 camera.

Dr. Heather Clark, associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University, is leading the research on the subdermal sensors. She said she was reminded of the benefits of real-time, wearable health monitoring when she entered a marathon in Vermont: If they become mass-produced and affordable for the consumer market, wireless devices worn on the body could tell you exactly what medication you need whenever you need it.

“I had no idea how much to drink, or when,” said Clark, reflecting on her marathon run. “Or if I should have Gatorade instead.”

Clark’s technology could spell out the eventual demise of the painful finger pricks required for blood tests — assuming users have an iPhone, which Northeastern bioengineering grad student Matt Dubach has customized to read light from the tiny sensors to collect and output data.

Here’s how it works: A 100-nanometer-wide set of sensors go under the skin, like tattoo ink — as for the size, “You can spot it if you’re looking for it,” Clark says. The sensors are encased in an oily agent to ensure the whole contraption stays together.

Within the implant, certain nanoparticles will bind exclusively to specific blood contents, like sodium or glucose. Thanks to an additive that makes the particles charge neutral, the presence of a target triggers an ion release, which manifests as a florescence change. The process is detailed in an article published in the journal Integrative Biology.

Dubach designed the iPhone 4 attachment to use the phone’s camera to read the color shift and translate the results into quantifiable data. A plastic ring surrounding the lens blocks out ambient light while a battery-powered blue LED contrasts with the sensors. The software uses the iPhone camera’s built-in RGB filters to process the light reflected off the sensors.

Why blue? Initial trials with lights that projected other colors were hindered by Apple’s built-in optical filter, but blue light uses the iPhone’s built-in RGB setup to process the data accurately. That blue light, powered by a 9-volt battery attached to the phone, works with the sensors’ red-shifted florescence because red shines well through skin.

As of now, the data collected with the iPhone still requires processing through a secondary machine, but Duboch says using the iPhone to do all the work is not far off, and that an app is likely on the way.

Clark hopes to see the work of an entire clinical analyzer done by nanoparticles interacting with smartphones, which would mean a major step forward for personalized medicine. Diabetics and athletes alike could adapt and measure their own statistics without dependence on big, pricey, exclusive medical equipment.

The testing is still in early stages, and hasn’t been tried on humans yet. Research on mice, who have comparatively thinner skin than humans, has shown promising results.

Readings of blood concentrations show up like this, with different colors indicating different sodium concentrations. Photo Courtesy of Matt Dubach.

When Apple’s next iPhone comes out, the project will benefit, said Dubach, citing rumors that the iPhone 5 will include a more powerful camera sensor.

“I’m holding out for the iPhone 5,” Dubach said. “More megapixels gives you more for the average,” meaning the higher-resolution camera provides more data for analysis. Even bioengineers are waiting for Steve Jobs’ next move.

The technology is still years off, but Clark and Dubach’s developments are bringing medicine closer to a time when diagnostics are minimally invasive. Real-time feedback through subdermal circuits and smartphone cameras means you could know exactly when to slug that water.

Researchers tested the iPhone attachment on this plate reader, which determines the nanosensors' response to the reader. Photo courtesy of Matt Dubach

What better way to combine your nerdy loves of computer programming and Star Wars than with a robot that can actually battle with a lightsaber?

This is “JediBot,” a Microsoft Kinect–controlled robot that can wield a foam sword (lightsaber, if you will) and duel a human combatant for command of the empire. Or something like that.

“We’ve all seen the Star Wars movies; they’re a lot of fun, and the sword fights are one of the most entertaining parts of it. So it seemed like it’d be cool to actually sword fight like that against a computerized opponent, like a Star Wars video game,” graduate student Ken Oslund says in the video above.

The world of dynamic robotics and AI has been immensely aided by the affordable, hackable Microsoft Kinect. The Kinect includes multiple camera and infrared light sensors, which makes recognizing, analyzing and interacting with a three-dimensional moving object — namely, a human — much simpler than in the past. Microsoft recently released the SDK for the Kinect, so we should be seeing increasingly useful and creative applications of the device. The KUKA robotic arm in the video above is traditionally used in assembly line manufacturing, but you may remember it from a Microsoft HALO: Reach light sculpture video last year.

According to the course overview (.pdf) for the “Experimental Robotics” course, the purpose of the laboratory-based class is “to provide hands-on experience with robotic manipulation.” Although the other groups in the class used a PUMA 560 industrial manipulator, the JediBot design team, composed of four graduate students including Tim Jenkins and Ken Oslund, got to use a more recently developed KUKA robotic arm. This final project for the course, which they got to choose themselves, was completed in a mere three weeks.

“The class is really open-ended,” Jenkins said. “The professor likes to have dynamic projects that involve action.”

The group knew they wanted to do something with computer vision so a person could interact with their robot. Due to the resources available, the group decided to use a Microsoft Kinect for that task over a camera. The Kinect was used to detect the position of JediBot’s opponent’s green sword-saber.

The robot strikes using a set of predefined attack motions. When it detects a hit, when its foam lightsaber comes in contact with its opponent’s foam lightsaber and puts torque on the robotic arm’s joints, it recoils and moves on to the next motion. It switches from move to move every one or two seconds.

“The defense mechanics were the most challenging, but people ended up enjoying the attack mode most. It was actually kind of a gimmick and only took a few hours to code up,” Jenkins said.

The project utilized a secret weapon not apparent in the video: a special set of C/C++ libraries developed by Stanford visiting entrepreneur and researcher Torsten Kroeger. Normally, the robot would need to plot out the entire trajectory of its motions from start to finish — preplanned motion. Kroeger’s Reflexxes Motion Libraries enable you to make the robot react to events, like collisions and new data from the Kinect, by simply updating the target position and velocity, with the libraries computing a new trajectory on-the-fly in less than a single millisecond.

This allows JediBot to respond to sensor events in real time, and that’s really the key to making robots more interactive.

Imagine a waiterbot with the reflexes to catch a falling drink before it hits the ground, or a karate robot you can spar against for practice before a big tournament.

I doubt anyone would be buying their own KUKA robotic arm and creating a sword-playing robot like JediBot in their home, but innovations like this using interactive controllers, and the availability of the Reflexxes Motion Libraries in particular for real-time physical responses, could help us see robots that better interact with us in daily life.

Video courtesy Stanford University/Steve Fyffe

CATRA is an invention of MIT’s Media Lab which uses a cellphone and a cheap plastic eyepiece to detect cataracts. Not only is it cheaper and easier to use than existing solutions, it actually provides much better results.

Cataracts cause blindness by fogging the lens of the eye, scattering light before it reaches the retina. Normally, they are diagnosed using a “backscatter” device which shines light into the eye and measures how much of it is reflected by the cataract. This requires a skilled user, a fancy machine and still doesn’t detect the problem early, nor tell the operator what the patient actually sees.

CATRA uses a smartphone with a custom app, and a cheap eyepiece. The patient holds it up to their eye and the app fires light successively at each part of the eye. The patient uses “the phone’s arrow keys” to adjust the brightness of these beams until they match. The app logs the differences in intensity required to reach the retina and creates a map of the eye. Thus is can detect the problem early, and also reflects the actual experience of the patient.

But most important, it requires no special hardware except for that simple eyepiece.

The product is about to undergo field testing for a future launch. The market for this is clearly the developing world, which is also the place where cellphone usage is taking off. It might be time to forget about programs like One Laptop Per Child and instead concentrate on the using smart-phones instead.

CATRA: Cataract Maps with Snap-on Eyepiece for Mobile Phones [MIT Media Lab via Cult of Mac]

See Also:

• Cellphones Affect Medical Equipment Says Study
• Android App Tracks, Helps Wandering Alzheimer's Sufferers
• MIT Exoskeleton: A Partial Success