Researchers at MIT and Harvard have new skin in the game when it comes to monitoring people’s bodily health. They have developed a new wearable technology in the form of colour- and shape-changing tattoos. These tattoos work by using bio-sensitive inks, changing colour, fading away or appearing under different coloured illumination, depending on your body chemistry. They could, for example, change their colour, or shape as their parts fade away, depending on your blood glucose levels.
This kind of constantly on, constantly working body monitoring ensures that there is nothing to fall off, get broken or run out of power. That’s important in chronic conditions like diabetes where monitoring and controlling blood glucose levels is crucial to the person’s health. The project, called Dermal Abyss, brings together scientists and artists in a new way to create a data interface on your skin.
There are still lots of questions to answer, like how long will the tattoos last and would people be happy displaying their health status to anyone who catches a glimpse of their body art? How would you feel having your body stats displayed on your tats? It’s a future question for researchers to draw out the answer to.
By Peter W. McOwan, Queen Mary University of London, Autumn 2018
Tiny microelectronic circuits, antennae and sensors can now be fabricated and set in the plastic of contact lenses. Researchers are looking at the possibility of using such sensors to sample and transmit the glucose level in the eye moisture: useful information for diabetics. Others are looking at lenses that can change your focus, or even project data onto the lens, allowing new forms of augmented and virtual reality.
Conveniently, you can turn the frequent natural motion from the blinks of your eye into enough power to run the sensors and transmitter, doing away with the need for charging. All this means that smart contact lenses could be a real eye opener for wearable tech.
by Peter W. McOwan, Queen Mary University of London, Autumn 2018
The first ever smart pill has been approved for use. It’s like any other pill except that this one has a sensor inside it and it comes with a tracking device patch you wear to make sure you take it.
A big problem with medicine is remembering to take it. It’s common for people to be unsure whether they did take today’s tablet or not. Getting it wrong regularly can make a difference to how quickly you recover from illness. Many medicines are also very, very expensive. Mass-produced electronics, on the other hand, are cheap. So could the smart pill be a new, potentially useful, solution? The pill contains a sensor that is triggered when the pill dissolves and the sensor meets your stomach acids. When it does, the patch you wear detects its signal and sends a message to your phone to record the fact. The specially made sensor itself is harmless and safe to swallow. Your phone’s app can then, if you allow it, tell your doctor so that they know whether you are taking the pills correctly or not.
Smart pills could also be invaluable for medical researchers. In medical trials of new drugs, knowing whether patients took the pills correctly is important but difficult to know. If a large number of patients don’t, that could be a reason why the drugs appeared less effective than expected. Smart pills could allow researchers to better work out how regularly a drug needs to be taken to still work.
More futuristically still, such pills may form part of a future health artificial intelligence system that is personalised to you. It would collect data about you and your condition from a wide range of sensors recording anything relevant: from whether you’ve taken pills to how active you’ve been, your heart rate, blood pressure and so on: in fact anything useful that can be sensed. Then, using big data techniques to crunch all that data about you, it will tailor your treatment. For example, such a system may be better able to work out how a drug affects you personally, and so be better able to match doses to your body. It may be able to give you personalised advice about what to eat and drink, even predicting when your condition could be about to get better or worse. This could make a massive difference to life for those with long term illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis, where symptoms flare up and die away unpredictably. It could also help the doctors who currently must find the right drug and dose for each person by trial and error.
Computing in future could be looking after your health personally, as long as you are willing to wear it both inside and out.
Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London, Spring 2021
These days art and high technology don’t mix much. Personal gadgets are one thing, jewellery quite another. That hasn’t always been the case though and hopefully it won’t be in the future. The tactful watch also shows how tech accessible to blind people can have other uses too.
In the 18th century there was a mobile revolution just like the current one. Back then the technology wasn’t the smart watch or MP3 player but the pocket watch. The 18th century watchmakers weren’t just innovators though they were also artists and craftsmen. The result was truly exquisite jewellery that was also highly functional.
One of the absolute masters was Abraham Louis Breguet. Born in Switzerland, he set up business in Paris and was to become one of the greatest innovators ever. His clients included the likes of Marie-Antoinette, King George IV of Britain, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Rather than build lots of identical watches he constantly tinkered with the designs. The result was that he is responsible for some of the most important innovations in clock technology. Many of his inventions were technical advances such as the first self-winding watch. He realised the importance of making his designs easy to use too though. A Breguet watch, made for the Queen of Naples, for example, was the first to be worn on the wrist!
In the 21st century we are just getting to grips with new ways of interacting with our personal gadgets. People have realised that basing mobile device designs on what works for a desktop PC is not so sensible. When on the move it’s not that convenient to have to look at a screen. Consequentially we are undergoing a revolution in multimodal computing. It involves finding ways of using our other senses not just sight to interact with computers. The way your phone vibrates in your pocket is one simple example – tactile computing, delivering information through your sense of touch.
Clever as we are Breguet was way ahead of us though. At the turn of the 18th century it was not considered polite to look at your watch in public. Breguet’s solution was the tact watch: a watch that allowed you to check the time without taking it out of your pocket. Tactile and tactful computing! His solution was of course (in all senses) incredibly elegant. It would also have been a great design for the blind and partially sighted – showing how designing for one use can have others too.
Round the edge were 12 evenly spaced diamond studs, with larger ones at the 3, 6, 9 and 12 positions. On the outside was an arrow. It did not move on its own like a normal clock hand, though. That wouldn’t really work inside a pocket without a glass case and then it couldn’t be touched. Hidden inside the case was an actual clock. When the owner wanted to tactfully check the time they would just spin the arrow until they felt resistance. That meant the arrow was now back in synchrony with the real hour hand. They could then count round the diamond studs to work out its position and so the time.
One of the most stunningly beautiful tact watches was made for Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of France in 1800. Two centuries later it sold at Chrysties for over $1.3 million.. The best we seem to be able to do in the 21st century is to just dip an iPod in gold and coat it with diamonds. The result: not 18th century elegance, just very expensive 21st century bling.
Artists and jewellers are starting to work with scientists and engineers again though so maybe our modern gadgets can follow the path of the watch and become elegant jewellery too.
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