Low Cost Synthetic Muscle from Nylon Fibers [video]

by Bruce Brown | November 24, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News

Nylon fiber has a new powerful new application; it can be used to make artificial muscle fibers, according to the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. Muscles expand and contract and previous artificial muscles do that as well. Real muscles, however, also bend,...

Sweat Patch Monitors Health with “Lab on the Skin” [video]

by Bruce Brown | November 23, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News

Biomarkers in human sweat could be used to monitor a patient’s health without blood samples if the sweat sample collection and measurement can be controlled. A multi-institution research team led by John Rogers of the McCormick School of Engineering and...

Autonomous Driving Comes to Scooters [video]

by Alfred Poor | November 16, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News, Health

One of the most important aspects of independent living is mobility: the freedom to go where you want, when you want. Paraplegics and others with physical disabilities may be confined to wheelchairs, but not everyone has the strength and dexterity require to power a...

3D Printed Heart-on-a-Chip Has Integrated Sensors [video]

by Bruce Brown | November 15, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News

What if we could avoid the first cautionary step of testing new medications on animals before human trials? Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created the first 3D-printed heart-on-a-chip with integrated...

Control Wearables without Touching Them [video]

by Alfred Poor | November 15, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News

Wearables face a vexing paradox. We want them to get smaller and smaller, yet smaller devices have less room available for buttons, touch pads, and other methods of controlling them. Solutions that work great for a desktop computer or tablet do not necessarily work...

Direct Brain Stimulation Provides Sense of Touch

by Alfred Poor | November 14, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News

Patients with prosthetic limbs or spinal cord damage don’t have a sense of touch from their limbs to provide feedback about their position or movements. We’ve written about a number of different research projects working on this problem, and here is...