New assistants !
This temporary tattoo can listen to your heart
This new wearable is a stick-on stethoscope that’s smaller than a penny
by Rachel Becker Nov 16, 2016
A new stick-on wearable sensor uses the symphony of internal rumblings, whooshing, gurglings, and cracklings to help doctors diagnose different conditions. And this souped-up, miniaturized stethoscope could one day be a way for clinicians to continuously monitor patients outside of the clinic. So far it’s been tested on chicken breasts and a very small group of people.
IT STICKS TO THE SKIN LIKE A TEMPORARY TATTOO
This wearable, smaller than a penny, can hear the beat of your heart, the sound of your voice, and even the whirr of an implantable heart pump, according to a paper published today in the journal Science Advances.
It sticks to the skin like a temporary tattoo. Inside the device, there’s an extremely sensitive accelerometer that can pick up the motion of sound waves as they travel through the flesh and fluids of the body. An electrode measures the electrical signals that nerves send to muscles to tell them to squeeze. These components lie sandwiched between layers of silicone and elastic that at their thickest point are only about two millimeters tall — about the thickness of your driver’s license stacked on top of your credit card. Right now, the device communicates with a computer via a wire, but the team is working on adding Bluetooth to connect it to a smartphone.
The device isn’t commercially available yet, but its potential applications include letting doctors monitor heart patients from afar, or listen for snoring during sleep studies. Because the wearable can also measure throat vibrations when a person is talking, the researchers are also planning trials that incorporate the wearable into speech therapy. Athletes or patients in physical therapy could use it to monitor blood flow and muscle contractions.
“This opens up a whole additional realm of measurement,” says John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Rogers and Jae-Woong Jeong at the University of Colorado Boulder were senior authors on the study. “The skin is serving as the window for measurements of underlying body processes.” It can potentially expand clinical trials, which are often difficult and costly for patients to participate in. And for patients who live far from the closest specialist for their condition, it may be able to give them added peace of mind — their doctor is still checking in, just remotely.
There are a couple advantages of a stick-on wearable over something like a Fitbit, says Howard Liu, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the lead scientist on the study. For one thing, the air gap between flesh and a Fitbit or another similar wearable makes it difficult to detect the simple beat of a pulse, let alone subtle body sounds or electrical signals. After all, when doctors measure the electrical activity of your heart with an electrocardiogram, they stick the electrodes to you — they don’t just drape them on your body. Plus, it’s flexible, stretchable, and lets sweat evaporate from underneath it, which means it’s more comfortable than a bulky bracelet.
Rogers’ team has been leading the way in developing wearable medical instruments, says George Malliaras, who is a professor of bioelectronics in France at the engineering graduate school MINES Saint-Etienne. (He wasn’t involved in the study.) “I was very happy when I read this work,” he says. “It advances the state of the art very much, and it allows us to monitor human health in a non-invasive fashion.”
THEY VIBRATED CHOPPED UP BITS OF CHICKEN TO TEST HOW VIBRATIONS TRAVELED THROUGH FLESH
Today’s paper was largely a description of the prototype device that still needs more testing in clinical settings. But the researchers did try it out in a couple of different applications. The first required a trip to the grocery store — since the experimental material was a chicken breast. Liu and his colleagues vibrated chopped up bits of chicken to test how well vibrations traveled through flesh. Malliaras, in the south of France, said this is actually standard for the field — though in France, “We use steak,” he says.
The researchers tried the device out on people, too, monitoring the heart sounds of eight elderly patients with heart conditions. The idea is that the wearable functions kind of like an autonomous stethoscope-electrocardiogram combo — monitoring the heart’s sounds and electrical activity. And in the future, the scientists think this device could also be used to keep tabs on internal devices like heart pumps that are hard to monitor because they’re out of sight. Liu and his colleagues weren’t able to test the wearable on heart pumps inside patients. But when they tested it on a pump outside of the body in the laboratory, the researchers could “hear” when a blood clot (made from cow’s blood) passed through it. “That’s a life supporting device,” Liu says. “If you don’t know whether that’s failing, then your life is in danger every second.”
The team also used the device to communicate with a computer and control a PacMan running around the screen by using the commands “Left,” “Right,” and “Up.” Rogers anticipates the criticism that any old microphone and voice-recognition software can do that, too. But because this wearable detects throat vibrations rather than spoken words, it’s immune to ambient noise, he says. That means it could be used as a way for security teams to quietly communicate with each other in noisy environments.
Liu says he and his colleagues might consider a spinoff company, but the wearable isn’t commercially available yet — and it’ll need a lot more testing and approval before anyone can sell it as a medical device. But when that time comes, there’s another, major advantage to a wearable that attaches to your skin: it will be a lot harder than a Fitbit to forget on the bathroom counter every single day.
Google Home — a better virtual
assistant
My wife and I were sitting in the kitchen last week discussing, apropos of nothing, the technology in our home that could be used for surveillance: smartphones, wireless cameras, smart speakers, games consoles and television boxes that all respond to voice commands.
Then all of a sudden, Alexa — our Amazon Echo device’s robo assistant — chimed in, telling us: “I’m listening.”
The coincidence was as amusing as it was surprising. Nonetheless, it was a little unnerving given that we had just invited another listening device into our living room.
Google Home is the search company’s new Echo competitor. At $129, it is cheaper than the full-sized Echo, which costs $179, but more expensive than the $50 Echo Dot, which plugs into an existing speaker.
This little white tube of microphones and speakers, which is half the size of the larger Echo and rather more elegant, is the latest device to carry Google’s new assistant, its equivalent of Alexa.
The best and worst thing about Google Home is that it plugs into the Google brain, and everything that company knows about me: my search queries, mapping and location, emails and web browsing. On top of this, Google Home and Amazon Echo list recordings of all the questions I have ever asked in their accompanying smartphone apps.
Google and Amazon let you delete these recordings, albeit at the risk of degrading the quality and reliability of their assistants’ personalised responses.
But as with so many useful internet services with potentially troubling privacy policies, it is better to be aware of these trade-offs before you become hooked on the product — as I already have.
If you do want to bring an ever-attentive robot helper into your home, the question then becomes: which smart speaker is more useful?
Speaking to a search engine
When it comes to simple fact checks and other basic interactions, there is little difference between Amazon Echo and Google Home. Both of them were able to tell me how old Robert Redford is, for instance, and the name of the king of Spain. Google wins points for efficiency, though not humanity, by talking more quickly than Alexa.
In more complex questions, with both, the user must know how to frame the question, which is often a process of trial and error.
Each failed when I asked, “What is the name of the volcano on the island of Sicily”, with Alexa drawing a total blank and Google telling me it was Stromboli — close, but actually on a small island just to the north.
Then I asked, “What is the name of the volcano in Sicily” — neither could find an answer. Finally, “What is the name of the volcano on Sicily” produced the right response from Google, although Alexa was still stumped as to the whereabouts of Mount Etna.
Even though the Echo is two years old, its new rival from Google is looking better at these search queries, and I would bet that Google will improve faster than Amazon too.
Talking to light switches
Amazon’s longevity does, however, give it the edge in the smart home arena. While it can still be frustrating to set up these connected-home systems, I love being able to control my lights by saying “turn on the living room” or “dim the lights in the kitchen”. Including the time it takes me to speak, it usually takes about five seconds for either assistant to comply, which does not feel like a noticeable delay.
I should note that Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, has got a lot faster at controlling HomeKit-compatible devices, especially on the iPhone 7. But Google Home and Amazon Echo work better at a distance and I prefer not having to pull my phone out of my pocket, while the Apple Watch remains rather slower to respond.
What marks Amazon out here is the long list of home devices and appliances that connect directly to the Echo, whereas Google requires a “bridge” such as Samsung’s SmartThings, meaning another white box to buy, configure and leave out on the table.
Alexa’s range of other skills (what Amazon calls voice-controlled apps) is also far larger than Google’s, from news and recipes to health tracking and what is trending on Twitter. Too many of these are single-use novelties, though.
Music maestro
Google, however, has one killer app that makes me lean towards its Home speaker, despite my privacy nerves. I am able to make almost any song play in every room in my house, just by asking Google.
That is because its assistant communicates wirelessly with my three Chromecast Audio dongles, which plug into speakers in my bedroom, kitchen and living room. The whole system plugs into Spotify’s big jukebox in the cloud.
Each Chromecast Audio costs $35 and can plug into any speaker, big or small, through a standard headphone jack. This is a truly magical experience. Google is remarkably good at understanding which band I’m asking for (even weirdly named ones like Mogwai).
Alexa can control music in one room at a time and the Echo is a better standalone speaker than Google Home, but at the moment the Echo lacks this multi-room synchronisation (and it couldn’t recognise Mogwai, either).
Verdict
Some reviewers have complained that it feels stranger to summon a virtual assistant by saying “OK Google”, because it is a corporate brand, than “Alexa”. I would agree that Alexa rolls off the tongue slightly more easily but either way, there is a huge internet corporation behind these compact, capable speakers.
If I am going to hand over even more of my daily activities to a big data-gobbling company, it may as well be the one that offers the more reliable answers and richer capabilities. Right now, that is Google Home.
Resume:
Those two articles talks about new assistants for human. They can help us in our daily or in specific cases. The first article talks about a mini-stethoscope smaller than a penny. This temporary tattoo helps doctors to analyse and diagnose different disease, using the motion of sound waves. It could one day be a way for clinicians to continuously monitor patients outside of the clinic. It can also be connected to our phone via bluetooth and controlled everything without feeling or knowing it. “This opens up a whole additional realm of measurement,” says John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
The second articles is about the new google home assistant. It permit us to answer all of our questions but no like the amazon echo it is more than that. In fact, it is not a robot answer but a much more human conversation between you and the machine. It can help you find your destination, how is the weather, if you have any meetings and also be connected to your house devises and interact with them. It can also be your personal DJ !
To conclude those two new technologic assistant can help us in our today society. Be able to communicate with them is just an incredible experience. Maybe one day, this mini stethoscope will save your live by detecting an unknown disease or google home just remember you to take your coat because it's cold outside. The little touches are always the best!
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