Amazon.com Inc. wants to make your hand your credit card.
The tech giant is creating checkout terminals that could be placed in bricks-and-mortar stores and allow shoppers to link their card information to their hands, according to people familiar with the matter. They could then pay for purchases with their palms, without having to pull out a card or phone.
The Times
Today, countless electronic devices have touchscreens, including smart phones, tablets and smart home appliances. Touchscreen interfaces have become some of the most common means for users to communicate with and browse through their devices.
With this in mind, a research group at imec in Belgium has recently carried out a study exploring the potential of touchscreen interfaces for enabling the simple transfer of data to and from devices connected to the internet. In a paper published in Nature Electronics, the team showed that commercial touchscreens can be used as reader interfaces for capacitive coupled data transfer using a 12-bit, thin-film identification tag powered by a battery or photovoltaic cell.
“Our field of expertise is flexible electronics for IoT and Internet of Everything applications,” Kris Myny, principal scientist at imec and one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “In this field, we look into thin-film circuits, i.e. flexible RFID tags that can be embedded in objects and communicate to RFID and/or NFC readers. Based on this, our next step was to investigate whether we could expand the number of readers.”
With 360 video, IEEE Spectrum takes you behind the scenes with one of the world’s first drone-delivery companies. Zipline, based in California, is using drones to deliver blood to hospitals throughout Rwanda. At an operations center in Muhanga, you’ll watch as Zipline technicians assemble the modular drones, fill their cargo holds, and launch them via catapult. You’ll see a package float down from the sky above a rural hospital, and you’ll get a closeup look at Zipline’s ingenious method for capturing returning drones.
You can follow the action in a 360-degree video in three ways: 1) Watch on your computer, using your mouse to click and drag on the video; 2) watch on your phone, moving the phone around to change your view; or 3) watch on a VR headset for the full immersive experience.
If you’re watching on an iPhone: Go directly to the YouTube page for the proper viewing experience.
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Science fiction writers envisioned the technology decades ago, and startups have been working on developing an actual product for at least 10 years.
Today, Mojo Vision announced that it has done just that—put 14K pixels-per-inch microdisplays, wireless radios, image sensors, and motion sensors into contact lenses that fit comfortably in the eyes. The first generation of Mojo Lenses are being powered wirelessly, though future generations will have batteries on board. A small external pack, besides providing power, handles sensor data and sends information to the display. The company is calling the technology Invisible Computing, and company representatives say it will get people’s eyes off their phones and back onto the world around them.
The first application, says Steve Sinclair, senior vice president of product and marketing, will likely be for people with low vision—providing real-time edge detection and dropping crisp lines around objects. In a demonstration last week at CES 2020, I used a working prototype (albeit by squinting through the lens rather than putting it into my eyes), and the device highlighted shapes in bright green as I looked around a dimly lit room.
STEM Bootstrapping in Bio-Medicine! — On this recent ideaXme (https://radioideaxme.com/) episode, I was joined by 24 year old Malawian inventor, Sanga Marcarios Kanthema, founder and CEO of two companies, Dolphin Health Innovations and QubiX Robotics, who’s bringing health tech innovations to one of the world’s poorest countries — #Ideaxme #Malawi #Robotics #EKG #Stethoscope #Prosthetics #MobileHealth #SmartPhones #Telemedicine #MedicalDrones #Health #Wellness #Longevity #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage
Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Sanga Kanthema, 24 year old electronics specialist and founder and CEO of two Malawi-based companies, Dolphin Health Innovations and QubiX Robotics.
Ira Pastor Comments:
On today’s show we are going to continue our “virtual global road trip” and our discussions about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) initiatives, and about ways they are disrupting the status quo. In doing so, we are heading back to the continent of Africa.
But first, we are going to start with some disconcerting statistics on the healthcare front.
The last 10 years have seen a lot change in the world of technology — but what will the next decade bring us?
A decade ago the hottest smartphone on the market was the iPhone 3GS — a phone with a miniscule 3.5” display and a far cry from the 6.5” screen available on the iPhone XS today.
Speakers have got bigger too, now coming packed with integrated circuits allowing us to do our shopping from our living rooms just by talking.
It’s no secret that the average smart phone today packs an abundance of gadgets fitting in your pocket, which could have easily filled a car trunk a few decades ago. We like to think about video cameras, music playing equipment, and maybe even telephones here, but let’s not ignore the amount of measurement equipment we also carry around in form of tiny sensors nowadays. How to use those sensors for educational purposes to teach physics is presented in [Sebastian Staacks]’ talk at 36C3 about the phyphox mobile lab app.
While accessing a mobile device’s sensor data is usually quite straightforwardly done through some API calls, the phyphox app is not only a shortcut to nicely graph all the available sensor data on the screen, it also exports the data for additional visualization and processing later on. An accompanying experiment editor allows to define custom experiments from data capture to analysis that are stored in an XML-based file format and possible to share through QR codes.
Aside from demonstrating the app itself, if you ever wondered how sensors like the accelerometer, magnetometer, or barometric pressure sensor inside your phone actually work, and which one of them you can use to detect toilet flushing on an airplane and measure elevator velocity, and how to verify your HDD spins correctly, you will enjoy the talk. If you just want a good base for playing around with sensor data yourself, it’s all open source and available on GitHub for both Android and iOS.