Lifeboat Foundation

Cyborg tech has mostly been backroom, squishy, bloody, and experimental. Now an FDA-approved surgically implanted hearing aid connects to your standard-issue iPhone.

Wireless charging is a relatively young technology, so it has a huge legroom for expansion. A team from Disney Research discovered one potential way to wirelessly charge mobile devices by just connecting to a WiFi signal.

CENTENNIAL, Colo., July 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Cochlear Limited (ASX: COH), the global leader in implantable hearing solutions, introduces today its latest innovation, the Cochlear ^™ Nucleus^® 7 Sound Processor. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in June, the Nucleus 7 Sound Processor is the world’s first Made for iPhone cochlear implant sound processor and the smallest and lightest behind-the-ear cochlear implant sound processor available on the market.^1–3

When you use smartphone AI apps like Siri, you’re dependent on the cloud for a lot of the processing — limited by your connection speed. But what if your smartphone could do more of the processing directly on your device — allowing for smarter, faster apps?

MIT scientists have taken a step in that direction with a new way to enable artificial-intelligence systems called convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to run locally on mobile devices. (CNN’s are used in areas such as autonomous driving, speech recognition, computer vision, and automatic translation.) Neural networks take up a lot of memory and consume a lot of power, so they usually run on servers in the cloud, which receive data from desktop or mobile devices and then send back their analyses.

Continue reading “How to run faster, smarter AI apps on smartphones” »

Why fight to charge your phone at a public outlet when a robot could do it for you?

Apple’s next iPhone may make the tape measure obsolete. (via CNBC)

UW engineers have designed the first battery-free cellphone that can send and receive calls using only a few microwatts of power. Mark Stone/University of Washington.

University of Washington researchers have invented a cellphone that requires no batteries — a major leap forward in moving beyond chargers, cords and dying phones. Instead, the phone harvests the few microwatts of power it requires from either ambient radio signals or light.

Continue reading “First battery-free cellphone makes calls” »

Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?

In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.

Continue reading “Click Here for Happiness” »

The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.

Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook.