Wearables

  NWTNLabs has announced the launch of RUNVI, the smart insoles that provide real measurement to help health and fitness lovers achieve their goals more efficiently, on Kickstarter.

When we talk about wearable technology being used in elite sport, it’s almost always in a positive light. Advancements in that sphere have proved an invaluable modern tool for coaches and athletes alike, from feedback on performance, to monitoring of physiological parameters in order to keep a check on an athlete’s physical condition. A startup has even come up with a head-up display (HUD), to go inside a swimmers goggles.

Recently Mark Patrick of Mouser was given the opportunity, for the first time, to visit the Wearable Technology Show at London’s ExCel (which is now in its fifth year). Here he explains about his experience and delves deeper into the wearable sector. Guest blog written by Mark Patrick, Mouser. 

The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery at Imperial College London has announced the key workshops of the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics 2018, plus the launch of a new CEO and Founders Forum. The interactive and hands-on workshops - spanning deep-learning for medical robotics to wearable and assisted robots - will take place on 24th June and 27th June 2018 (from 9am-1pm, and 2-5.30pm), and the new CEO and Founders Forum will be held on June 26th. 

Based in Edinburgh, Shot Scope Technologies designs and manufactures innovative wearable technology which helps both professional and amateur golfers to improve their game. A keen golfer with a background in electronics design, CEO David Hunter set up the company in 2014 to develop the golf wearable, which collects and analyses over 100 key statistics from each round played, identifying shots, club used and GPS information. The data can then be easily uploaded to any smartphone or tablet (via an app) or computer.

Flexible televisions, tablets and phones as well as ‘truly wearable’ smart tech are a step closer thanks to a nanoscale transistor created by researchers at The University of Manchester and Shandong University in China. The international team has developed an ultrafast, nanoscale transistor – known as a thin film transistor, or TFT, - made out of an oxide semiconductor. The TFT is the first oxide-semiconductor based transistor that is capable of operating at a benchmark speed of 1GHz.

  The IDTechEx Wearable Europe conference and exhibition, to be held on 11th-12th April in Berlin Germany, will bring together the ecosystem global brands with technology developers, focusing on the commercial growth opportunities for wearable technology.

  Alpha Micro Components has announced the availability of the u-blox ZOE-M8B, a GNSS System-in-Package (SiP) that looks set to revolutionise small battery powered consumer devices, including portables and wearables. The ZOE-M8B SiP offers the best possible balance of power consumption and positional accuracy in its class.

A team of researchers at UC San Diego and San Diego State University has developed a pair of '4D goggles' that allows wearers to be physically 'touched' by a movie when they see a looming object on the screen, such as an approaching spacecraft. The device was developed based on a study conducted by the neuroscientists to map brain areas that integrate the sight and touch of a looming object and aid in their understanding of the perceptual and neural mechanisms of multisensory integration.

After the lasting successes of Smartphones and Smart TV’s, wearable technology has emerged as the next big player in the technology field. The 'quantified self' ideology (logging a person’s life to bring objectivity to areas normally clouded by feelings and impressions) is beginning to catch on in Europe, and German industry association Bitkom forecasts wearable revenues to climb to as much as 8.8 billion euros in 2018.