technizzel

With ongoing and trying debates dealing with the issue of stem cell research, it seems that such a future is moments away and yet still too far. The ability to understand certain diseases, clone body parts, and replace amputated or missing parts, are few of the many positive aspects that we expect from the continuing efforts in this field. However, in the mean time, a few companies are perfecting a different art of replacing limbs with prosthetic limbs. One special company, Touch Bionics, has taken the liberty to broadcast its success stories with its i-LIMB system. In recent news, for example, an Iraq war veteran was given the chance to experiment a new artificial arm, triumphing into a new era of biomaterial revolution. Able to provide a service to those who had helped us in a time of need, we can only hope to further such a pioneering innovation.

Sergeant Juan Arredondo is a brave man, who unfortunately, was affected by the protracted terror in Iraq. He and three others were exposed to a bomb two years ago, costing the young man his hand. Lindsay Block is another woman who had lived with prosthetics her whole life, having been born without an arm at birth. John German faced the grim circumstance of being diagnosed a bit too late with the thoracic outlet syndrome and was forced to have his hand amputated from his body. Such examples serve as a horrid reality for a few of these people who have dealt with prosthetics , including the myoelectric hand. This hand is what allows these men and women to cope with their lives, but of course, with some difficulty. After having been fitted with the i-LIMB hand, their lives have changed only for the better. So let us unravel the knowledge behind this product- a product leading people toward happier and healthier lives!

Touch Bionics was founded on an idea that developed back in 1963, at the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital in Edinburgh. Thorough research was conducted for children affected by Thalidomide,. After a brief hiatus, the research continued in 1988 to create arms, shoulders, wrists, and hands. Throughout the nineties, the partial hand system started to receive recognition internationally and led to many awards in the coming years. Touch EMAS (EMAS standing for Edinburgh Modular Arm System) was then established, soon to be changed to Touch Bionics that included a technology appeal for its consumers. Now responsible for the i -LIMB hand as well as the ProDigits, together both products are able t o provide enhanced lives for those who use them.

The i-LIMB hand is a unique prosthetic hand that not only models the similar physical features of a natural hand but also the sensitive gripping and holding aspects. Using high strength plastics, the hand is lightweight yet strong, providing the best combination for its customers. Combining the old with the new, the i-LIMB system uses a two-input myoelectric (muscle signal) to open and close the hand’s life-like fingers. An electric signal is produced from the muscle that activates the Myoelectric controls. Looking further into the design, the ProDigits, or the individual fingers, are able to model the movements of regular fingers. Their unique design even allows for consumers to easily remove and replace each finger in the case of damages or other emergencies, unlike old myoelectric hands that force the person to wait extended periods of times.

An important feature of the i-LIMB hand is the gripping ability that a normal hand would posses, but as in all efforts mimicking the human body, requires a great deal of effort to emulate. Starting with the thumb, a part of the human body that has encouraged our dominance on this planet, it is able to rotate into many of the same positions. The gripping features are simply controlled again by the signals that our body emits, which allow for a person to adjust the amount of grip needed to hold an item. A few types of grips that we take for granted that this i-Limb can imitate, include the key grip (thumb closes down onto the side of the index finger), the power grip (all fingers and the thumb close down together), the precision grip (index finger and thumb meet), and index point (thumb and fingers close but the index finger remains extended).

So now we have this amazing figure of a hand that can copy most if not all the movements of a hand, but also looks like a real hand. Touch Bionics accomplishes this feat via two methods that can satisfy any patient. The first is through the unique i-LIMB skin, which fits like a glove over the robotic fingers and hand. The other way is with high-definition cosmesis, which includes blending the hand anatomically with the rest of the body to augment a more natural look. The skin itself is a conglomeration of efforts that were developed to project a breakthrough in the lifelike material.

This hand is a stepping stone in the mechanical sense, but would not be considered a success without the background technology that accompanies the product. As Touch Bionics explains, “Two small metal electrode plates, which detect the minute electrical signals generated by the remaining muscles in the limb stump, are placed against the skin to pick up signals.” Most patients who have an amputated limb experience a phantom feeling, emitting signals as if that limb still existed. Such signals are what trigger the hand to move and allow for patients to adjust to the feeling of a hand accordingly.

Allowing for individuals to continue their lives and blend back into society are usually dreams for those who have undergone such a terrible event. As some of Touch Bionics executives have stated, ““We are delighted that this world-breaking technology which emanated from NHS [National Health System] Scotland has reached this important milestone of commercial acceptance.” For those wishing to contribute this area of technology, the company and many like it, are looking for training and occupational therapists, sales and business development experts, and of course, electro-mechanical engineers. Such a hand takes hours of work, many minds of creativity, and a motivation to help those truly in need- perhaps the opening of this gateway will only instigate the excellence to continue!

Learn more: www.touchbionics.com

Let’s not deny the obvious- that the iPhone is a conglomeration of the supreme features of all phones that have come to pass in the up and coming telecommunications age. It’s the best of all the phones out there. We’ll ignore how they chose one of the slowest networks as their internet provider, but other than that, what is there not to love?

As iPhone is Apple’s newest and biggest venture, we have to assume that the notorious iPod is a natural feature. Already we start with a feature that exceeds the practicality of SMS and completely destroys the cute alphabetized contact list attached to every phone released to the world public. You can only activate this very phone through iTunes as well as equip the phone with the same play lists on your Ipod. Using a program that incorporates the same features as iTunes, Cover Flow can help you store songs in the 4 GB or 8 GB memory. As iPods and iTunes, alike, have swept the nation, their hottest member has just joined the team.

A few of the simple features include the primitive call, text, voicemail, and pictures. A person may wonder why they are a paying a star price of 500 dollars for a phone that does what any other phone can do, but the iPhone has revolutionized each feature with a bit of style. For calling anyone, for example, all you need to do is press the number that shows on the screen. If the person is in your contacts, on a website, or on a map with local restaurants, there is no need to physically press the seven digits- just once will do! In the teenage land of texting, where idk, lol, and btw say more than what may appear as random letters strung together, the iPhone aids this language with the famous QWERTY keyboard. You can text with a full keyboard of letters at your fingertips, assisted by a program that spell checks your texts as well. The best part, is the voicemail: you don’t have to listen to all of them again and again and again; you just choose the ones you want to hear, save, or delete. And for the finale, Apple will not suffice with a simple showing of pictures- No, they allow you to drag your fingers along the pictures, mimicking movements to enlarge them or shrink them. With its 2.0 megapixel camera, taking and viewing pictures have never been more fun. Simple just came with a new sense of style!

One of the few aspects that has drawn people out of their beds at 2 AM was the Internet accessibility. Just as your laptop can acquire a Wi-Fi signal, this phone will deliver you Google, the New York Times, YouTube, and more through your own wireless network. Equipped with Safari and an HTML email client, it can synchronize bookmarked pages with that of your own computer as well as instantly connect to search engine to fit your desire. Instant magnifying is always at the touch of a fingertip, making any reading piece far from a hassle. Naturally, of course, like any lost road-runner, the use of satellite road navigation systems accessed via the phone’s internet, is more like a God’s gift of solace and why anyone would want Internet in the first place. The last bit rests in widgets- a term referencing the many small applications that keep a person on his or her own toes, including stock market updates and weather reports.

Now that we know this phone a little better, it’s time we understand some of the secrets behind the glassy screen. With a 3.5 inch display and weighing about 4.8 ounces, the phone is quite optimal to hold for a long conversation or surf the internet. Actually according to Apple, “iPhone will feature up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback…and 250 hours of standby time”. The extra time provided by this smart phone, as most others in its league offer on average 6 hours of talk time, is credited by the technologies of its operating system, OS X, and the sensors.

There are four major programs that were implemented into the phone to encourage the success that it is now experiencing. The first of which includes Multi-touch, an interface that specializes in allowing a person to touch the screen to access different parts of the phone. Working with three layers in the glass field, the TFT LCD display, the capacitive touch layer, and the protective shield all comprise to create this Multi-touch surface that dominates that phone’s unique appeal. Complementing the Multi-touch feature, is its operating system, OS X- “the world’s most advanced operating system”. It allows for a person to view rich HTML email, internet, and Safari, which includes calendar, text messaging, Address Book, weather, and more. Focusing on using Web 2.0 applications in the OS X operating system, Apple comments, “Web 2.0-based applications are being embraced by leading developers because they are far more interactive and responsive than traditional web applications, and can be easily distributed over the Internet and painlessly updated by simply changing the code on the developers’ own servers.” Another essential facet to the iPhone, is of course, the wireless component. Governed by quadband GSM, a global standard or wireless for all phones, the iPhone is also supported by AT&T’s EDGE network, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR. And granted, that in this day and age when speed is what matters most, the iPhone is capable of switching between EDGE and Wi-Fi to provide the customer with optimal speeds at all time. Lastly, are the built-in sensors, arranged in three types, and which further ensure the prolonged nature of this product. The accelerometer, for example, allows for you to rotate the device but yet still keep the object in focus and upright at all times. The proximity sensor detects how close it is to certain objects, as if to know its too near or too far from a proper viewing distance, and turns off the display to save power. And for the cherry on top, the ambient light sensor adjusts the amount of light needed to see the screen in order to save power and provide for the quintessential viewing experience.

With over 200 patents attributed to the creation of this phone, the iPhone is a story waiting for a heroic ending. We have not yet reached a climax, but the beginning has been, as always, a bit shaky for the newcomer. As small flaws, such as not being able to send texts to multiple people at once, exist, there are a plethora of features that any phone company would love to adapt to their machines. The technologies engineered to render a phone easy to use and fun to have are what attract the average customer to this piece of eye-candy. We have only to wait and see what is in store for this pioneering phone- a benchmark for the phones to come!

Video Links:

http://www.apple.com/iPhone/usingiPhone/guidedtour_medium.html

http://www.apple.com/iPhone/ads/ad1/

http://www.apple.com/iPhone/usingiPhone/keyboard_large.html

I know we have all been in that situation, either in a bus, train, or classroom, when that one miscellaneous cell phone starts to buzz. Quickly a sea of heads looks right, left, behind, and in front if not having sought down into their own bags or pockets, trying to find this vibrating mobile. Now that everyone in the civilized world has acquired this device, unless your ring tone resembles Buy U A Drank or Summer Love, it might be a little embarrassing to put one of those pre-recorded tunes that Verizon downloaded into your phone. Sometimes you just have to vibrate like everyone else in the room. So what makes a phone vibrate that perfect pitch?

The process is very simple, as Howstuffworks.com performed an autopsy on a Tickle-Me-Elmo to discover this exact answer. The doll’s shaking is comparable to a phone’s vibration, which can be explained through the interaction between a quaint flywheel motor and a weight. The weight, approximately that of five nickels, is attached off-center on a gear. As soon as the motor instigates the gear-weight system to turn at speeds of 100 to 150 RPM, a vibration action is immediately caused. This system would be replicated in a smaller version to fit inside your cell phone, but the principles and setup remains virtually the same.

In the end, you always are forced to silence or vibrate your phone when you enter a movie theater or a lecture. And despite your impassioned desire to listen to T-Paine and JT, social etiquette demands otherwise. At least now, you know what happens as you search for your vibrating phone, gears, weight and all!

It’s a wild craze, the Wii console, in which friends group together in front of the television batting balls, climbing walls, or racing cars. Perhaps, one of the most popular games for Wii is tennis. People have become completely engrossed in this virtual sport, striking aces like Roddick and angling shots like Federer. I was watching two of my friends play each other in the game, and in doing so, one of them hit the other when going for a forehand. Besides trying to stop myself from laughing, I realized how involved everyone gets into this game, just as they had done during the Nintendo 64 or the PS2/PS3 phases.

Waving the remote around is fun, yet being engineers we have to wonder what happens behind the scenes. The main parts to this system include a console, a sensor bar, a remote, a nunchuk, a sports disc, a console stand, an AC adaptor, and an AV cable. Additional parts, such as extra controllers, remotes, or Nunchuks, are sold separately, but are probably necessary if you wish to play with friends.

The console is a sleek white design that is about the size of three DVD cases stacked together. It’s compatible with any of the games offered to the Gamecube and can connect to the Internet on a wireless provider or through a LAN adaptor. Like most game console devices, the Wii allows for four controllers to be attached. The PowerPC CPU is the soul to this fun-filled masterpiece of design, made with a 90nm SOI CMOS and jointly produced with IBM.

Assisting the console, is the famous controller, a shape uncommon to the avid video-gamer but still possessing many of the same features. The remote is your tennis racket, your weapon, or your steering wheel because unlike past remotes, this one is equipped with motion- sensing technology. It also serves as a speaker and a rumble feature as well as outfitted with ports for expansion devices such as the Nunchuk. Within the Nunchuk is an analog stick that allows for gamers to control character movement while still handling the remote with the other hand to hit a ball or dodge an enemy.

All such motion-sensing processes are carried through the sensor bar that operates via Bluetooth technology. It can register actions from up to thirty feet away and as for specific pointing actions, it will acknowledge them from up to fifteen feet away. These revolutionary parts enlist gamers to reach their potential as the best pilots, athletes, or adventure-seeking-soldiers in a manner quite different from the past sit-down games.

Now inside the innovative CPU are newly reformed semi-conductors that are manufactured into a smaller chip and enforces less power consumption. The new ideal of this game console is thus, “high performance with lower power consumption”- the way it should be! This allows for the console to be on for 24 hours a day, and simultaneously can be connected to the Internet for just as long. Another attribute was the improved ICs (integrated circuits) of this system. Normally, creating such an involved device would produce more heat than a regular console. To compensate for the difference, the design of these ICs is key to allowing such a product make its way into many households across the country. The sensor technology inside the controller is what makes this console one of the most desired, as it is built with a sensor system that detects 200 signal changes per second.

The makers of this pioneering technology concur on the idea that this will welcome a new era of gaming in the industry. The motion-sensing and unique designs of the console and controller allow for everyone to get completely involved, almost losing sense of the real world. Without the ingenious ideas from these inventors, we would still be moving characters with our fingers instead of our minds and bodies. The Wii system is encouraging modifications in standard technologies and focusing this generation toward a finer art of playing video games.

Read More: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/nintendo-revolution.htm

Video Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=p5cPVP_llfo

There was a flurry of activity a few months ago regarding the secret Microsoft product release planned for Wednesday morning by the same team that worked on the Xbox^™ and the Zune^™ devices. Blogs and technology sites were out in full force with predictions and well-crafted rumours, building hype for what was thought to be an updated version of the Zune^™ music player. Instead, Microsoft^® made press everywhere double-take and scratch their heads wondering what a touch-sensitive table could possibly mean.

The Surface^™, a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor is the first commercially available surface computer in production, with business partners like Sheraton^® and T-Mobile^® set to use the devices in their locations as early as the end of the year.

The Surface^™ is powered by a rear-projector and cameras in the enclosure.

The concept is simple. Instead of using touch-screen technology, cameras sense objects, gestures, and touch on the screen. The display is powered by a rear-projection system, housed in the same central enclosure as the cameras, alongside a massive tesla coil that fries any Apple products placed nearby (Only kidding).

In press videos on the Microsoft^® website, a few applications are demonstrated:

• Photo – A simple photo editor where photos can be resized and dragged about.
• Paint – A painting program that works much like finger paint.
• Games – A puzzle game was shown, where pieces of glass illuminated with fractions of an image by the screen can be moved around and solved
• Restaurant tables can benefit from Surface™, as it recognizes drinks, helps order menu items, and helps pay for the night.Virtual Concierge – A map application that can give directions and save routes to portable devices.

• Restaurant – Drinks are recognized when they are placed on the table, dynamic payment methods (dragging and dropping meal items to various credit cards placed on table to split bills, etc.), virtual ordering.
• Music – Users can dynamically flip through music, buy it, and drag-and-drop it to their portable music players.

While dragging around photos will become mundane after half an hour, the Microsoft^® Surface^™ looks quite promising for developers and consumers alike in the ability to produce quite a large variety of applications that take advantage of its user interface. Having a Surface^™ in the living room would brighten up the atmosphere, eating on a Surface^™ in a restaurant would make ordering, waiting for, and paying for meals much easier, and buying products in-store would be made much easier for the consumer if placing something of interest on the Surface^™ would provide information and specifications.

Apple^® seems to be in the process of creating something similar; with rumors that they will include touch-screen displays in their next line of products, and with OSX Leopard^™ being resolution-independent, this is not too far-fetched.

Here’s to hoping, however, that this new age of computing is not marred by consumers arriving home only to see their living room basked in the eerie, cold glow of the blue screen of death.

Follow the link to check it out: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

According to the 2006 Nielson study, cited in USA Today, an average American family watches about 8 hours and 14 minutes of television a day. Clearly, since the days of turning knobs for volume and channels have vanished, the hours spent in front of this tube have only increased. It’s almost sad to say that the days of referring to the television set as a tube are also numbered because let’s face it- a flat screen is just beautiful.

Yes, beautiful, because now unlike the regular CRTs (Cathode Ray Tube) that we have grown up with, we have our HDTVs- sleek, shiny models that mock the bulky sets of black boxes sitting on tables about to fall due to accruing layers of dust. It’s not as if we can even walk into Circuit City, and say, “Yes, I would like that 30 inch TV over there.” There are Direct View TVs, projection sets, LCDs, and Plasmas…but if they’re all TVs, what’s better? What’s the best? What’s the difference?

The two most popular types of televisions in the up and coming market are LCDs (Liquid Crystal Display) and Plasma. To the naked eye, each shares physical similarities; however, what lies beneath the surface is what characterizes these two displays. The plasma monitor, for example, functions by the help of tiny gas plasma cells that are charged by exact electrical voltages to create a picture. While also being able to show blacks better, providing better contrasts when demonstrating other colors, the plasma screen offers a higher resolution than either the CRT or the LCD monitor. At the moment, plasma also offers wider viewing angles than either TV. Its characterizing mark, though, is how it can be molded into a lightweight mode of style, perhaps only three inches wide able to hang on your wall like a picture frame- it’s too bad that they’re just a smidgen beyond a college student’s budget!

LCDs, on the other hand, offer a compromise that is seemingly ideal. Unlike plasmas, the LCD operates with the use of a liquid crystal solution that wavers between a solid and liquid state and rests between two polarizing transparent panels. Innately are lightweight by design, which makes them perfect for laptop and desktop monitors or any screen less than forty inches. The most enticing aspect of the LCD screen is that the burn-in settles in at a much slower rate than the plasma, allowing for a longer lifespan.

Sadly, each screen has a few drawbacks that prove difficult when having to make the choice for yourself. With the LCDs, for example, they have lesser quality in black levels which mean that colors are not as vibrant. The viewing angle is narrower as well, and instead of looking uniform throughout the screen, certain areas appear lighter or darker which take away from the overall viewing appeal.

Not to take away from the pleasure of watching an LCD screen because they do offer quality that rivals any plasma monitor; it’s just that the plasma screen has very few faults. Such perfection, though, comes at a steep price- the prime fault. Plasma screens also provide a lesser native resolution- the resolution at which a TV or monitor is designed to display images. And the worst facet is its susceptibility to a quick burn-in, which attributes to its shorter life-span.

However, to the viewer sitting in front of the television set for eight hours a day, I doubt he or she would notice the narrow viewing angles of the LCD or the lesser native resolution of the plasma. Each screen offers a myriad of positives, but naturally is coupled with negatives that force the consumer to be wary of choice. If you are interested for a long-lasting TV but willing to sacrifice quality, shoot for the LCD, but if you want to show off a sleek design, go with a plasma. Just don’t forget what it was like watching saved by the bell on ye old cathode ray tube!

Video Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=3DAr8Udu-vU