Urine-Powered Cell Phone Charging [video]

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

In an increasingly connected world, sometimes you have to take power where you find it. Thin film batteries may address wearable concerns of bulkiness, but what about times when you’re off the grid and still need power? That’s where Microbial Fuel Cells...

Stretchable “Skin” Display Senses Touch [video]

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

We are constantly moving toward technology that is more like us, whether it’s the ability to “understand” and win a complex game like Go, or to create a humanoid device to interact with us as a caregiver or companion. And we will need to move beyond...

Smartphone Tracks Parkinson’s Symptoms [video]

by Alfred Poor | March 10, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News, Medical

Parkinson’s Disease is a chronic, debilitating disease for which there is currently no cure, yet it affects seven to 10 million people worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ranks complications from the disease as the 14th leading cause...

New Implant Technology Uses Metal and Ceramics

by Alfred Poor | March 9, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News

The future of wearable Health Tech devices depends on their ability to get under our skin. Implants are the shortest distance to reliable, always-on biometric sensing and other interactive tasks. One important barrier to this future is the size of the device. Larger...

Hybrid Conductor Stretches to 4 Times Its Size [video]

by Alfred Poor | March 8, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News

What are you looking at in the photo above? It’s a sheet of plastic with electrical conductors on its surface. These traces connect LEDs to a power source, and you can see that the electricity is reaching them because they are glowing green. So far, so what?...

Flexible Display Leads to Bending Interface [video]

by Alfred Poor | March 7, 2016 | Enabling Tech, General News

Long-time readers of Health Tech Insider know that we pay a lot of attention to the user interface for wearable devices. There’s no one right answer; touch, gesture, speech recognition, and even brain-hardware interfaces all have a part to play. Still,...