healthcare technology

Purdue University engineers have developed a method to transform existing cloth items into battery-free wearables resistant to laundry. These smart clothes are powered wirelessly through a flexible, silk-based coil sewn on the textile.

In the near future, all your clothes will become smart. These smart clothes will outperform conventional passive garments, thanks to their miniaturized electronic circuits and sensors, which will allow you to seamlessly communicate with your phone, computer, car and other machines.

This smart clothing will not only make you more productive but also check on your health status and even call for help if you suffer an accident. The reason why this smart clothing is not all over your closet yet is that the fabrication of this smart clothing is quite challenging, as clothes need to be periodically washed and electronics despise water.

Purdue engineers have developed a new spray/sewing method to transform any conventional cloth items into battery-free wearables that can be cleaned in the washing machine.

"By spray-coating smart clothes with highly hydrophobic molecules, we are able to render them repellent to water, oil and mud," said Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in Purdue's School of Industrial Engineering and in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering. "These smart clothes are almost impossible to stain and can be used underwater and washed in conventional washing machines without damaging the electronic components sewn on their surface."

read the study at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2021.106155

read the original and unedited version of the article at https://phys.org/news/2021-06-wearables-future-washable-smart-powered.html

People often turn to technology to manage their health and wellbeing, whether it is

• to record their daily exercise,
• measure their heart rate, or increasingly,
• to understand their sleep patterns.

Sleep is foundational to a person’s everyday wellbeing and can be impacted by (and in turn, have an impact on) other aspects of one’s life — mood, energy, diet, productivity, and more.

As part of Google's ongoing efforts to support people’s health and happiness, Google has announced Sleep Sensing in the new Nest Hub, which uses radar-based sleep tracking in addition to an algorithm for cough and snore detection.

The new Nest Hub, with its underlying Sleep Sensing features, is the first step in empowering users to understand their nighttime wellness using privacy-preserving radar and audio signals.

Understanding Sleep Quality with Audio Sensing

The Soli-based sleep tracking algorithm gives users a convenient and reliable way to see how much sleep they are getting and when sleep disruptions occur.

However, to understand and improve their sleep, users also need to understand why their sleep is disrupted.

To assist with this, Nest Hub uses its array of sensors to track common sleep disturbances, such as light level changes or uncomfortable room temperature. In addition to these, respiratory events like coughing and snoring are also frequent sources of disturbance, but people are often unaware of these events.

As with other audio-processing applications like speech or music recognition, coughing and snoring exhibit distinctive temporal patterns in the audio frequency spectrum, and with sufficient data an ML model can be trained to reliably recognize these patterns while simultaneously ignoring a wide variety of background noises, from a humming fan to passing cars.

The model uses entirely on-device audio processing with privacy-preserving analysis, with no raw audio data sent to Google’s servers. A user can then opt to save the outputs of the processing (sound occurrences, such as the number of coughs and snore minutes) in Google Fit, in order to view personal insights and summaries of their night time wellness over time.

read the entire unedited blog post at https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/03/contactless-sleep-sensing-in-nest-hub.html