Can you believe these Wearables?

I'm very happy to introduce to you some exciting new technologies particularly in the field of wearable electronics.

Hello, I'm Giovanni Saggio and my work is my passion. I teach electronics at the university level and I design and develop new electronics for biotech applications. I'm very happy to have the privilege to bring to you some interesting stories and curiosities about wearables.

Wearables means every smart technological object that you can put on. Now, I don't want to stress you with intrusive and overbearing wearables like those in the Apollo 13 movie, which made the astronauts sick and tired. I do want you, however, to consider the benefits that wearables can bring, the pleasure that they can give you, and their usefulness.

What about attending a university lecture where your professor is explaining human kinematics while dressing in wearables? The T-pose of the professor that you see in the video is for calibration purposes. It has to say to the wearables where they are in the 3D space. This will permit all the movements of the professor’s body to be correctly measured and arranged in the space. Amazing. Maybe you think it is quite silly for a professor of engineering to be kitted out in the wearables in this way, but what about a newborn baby?

Doctors use a cannula, a thin tube inserted into the nose or the mouth to measure your baby’s respiratory air flux. You can imagine the stress for the little ones. Wearables can solve this problem. These two flashing lights on the baby are wearables measuring the movements of his chest. See the graph at the bottom of the video. And thus, indirectly the amount of inhaled and exhaled air, without any discomfort for the newborn. Now you might not be a baby and it is also possible that you don't want to have a baby at the moment. But if you are planning to have a baby, take a look at this.

Touch over Internet. Touch here, feel there. This is a project named Fundawear by Durex, Inc. It is a nice way to be in contact, or to feel in contact with your partner when he or she is not with you. Another way to be in contact is to send your partner pictures and videos. You can record all day long, but without having the camera in your hands all the time. You can wear it and hide it, so no one knows you are filming. This is called RecorderGear HC100 and it is effectively a hidden spy camera hat.

Meanwhile, the Jenix Jxwbt12 is a wristband watch with a hidden camera operated by finger touch. And FrontRow by Ubiquiti company is a live-logging camera in the shape of a pendant. Here is another example, but now the camera is not hidden. Just attach the BLINCAM from Comfy to the temples of glasses, and take a picture with a wink.

The Blippar company has also developed the smart glasses that superimpose virtual reality on augmented reality. They are really useful for getting to know the places you are visiting, or the kind of food we are eating and many other things.

Otherwise use your head by putting on sensory headwear. What is this? A head with sensors inside to measure your head movements. Who could use such a device? Paraplegic people for instance who cannot use their legs and arms because they are paralysed and have to ask somebody else to do something for them at home, like switch on the light, opening the door, switch off the air conditioner etc. But with this sensory headwear, people with such severe physical disabilities can now act freely by themselves and successfully perform quite a number of tasks in the house.

Unfortunately, there are some people who cannot move their heads either, they are locked in. That is, they are well and truly alive but unable to move at all. Wearables can help them too. In this case, wearables are pieces of a system called the brain computer interface (or BCI). The BCI can measure electrical voltages generated on a person’s scalp as they think, and those voltages can be used to decode thoughts. Incredible, isn't it? Here is an example of how BCI works. A colleague of mine, Professor Luigi Bianchi, international expert in BCIs, is testing a system I made that closes virtual hands on a screen, by simply thinking of the closing movements, and voila. In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg during the F8 conference expressed an interest in the development of a wearable able to decode our thoughts. We haven't heard much from him on it since then, but I can tell you that a student of mine was able to develop a BCI system to view his own thoughts on an oscilloscope.

Here are some more colleagues of mine at the Santa Lucia Hospital in Rome. I made a working BCI for a paralysed girl who operated our system to control the movements of an avatar of virtual hands, using nothing more than her mind. More fascinating stuff with many possibilities for the future.

What other kinds of wearables may we imagine in the future? Dong-Jin Koh, President and CEO of Samsung, predicts that 5G will shift the tech industry and consumers towards wearables. 5G stands for the fifth generation of the wireless transmitting protocol, capable of transmitting much more data and in less time than we'd expect for the 4G that our smartphone currently uses.

Yun-Je Kang, senior Vice President and head of the Samsung electronics’ design team, affirms that smartphone design has its limits, and so in five years or so people will not even realise they are wearing screens. Smartphones may decline, but new devices will emerge. This shift from smartphones to wearables will represent an important breakthrough for many important companies, like Huawei, Samsung, Apple, HTC, etc.

Huawei, at the forefront of the technology, is ramping up the shipment of wearables fast. It quadrupled them in the first quarter of 2019. Huawei’s Research Manager, Jitesh Urbani, leads the company's mobile device tracker team, which is aiming to merge wearables with virtual and augmented reality to produce amazing and completely new devices, more powerful, intuitive, audio-video based and user-friendly.

Huawei’s Kirin A1 is a chip made for wearables and earbuds. The first inkling on how wearables could replace smartphones can be found by answering your phone using your finger. This technology is based on bone conduction. What is bone conduction? To conduct water, you need a pipe. To conduct electricity, you need a wire. To conduct sound, believe it or not, you can use your bones. ORII, a ring made by Origami Labs, is a wearable converting the electromagnetic waves of phone transmission into sound waves, and those sound waves are then transmitted through the bones of your finger to your ear, so that you can hear the phone call.

Another device using this phenomenon is GET, a high-tech wearable bracelet based on bone conduction, allowing you to answer calls with your fingers and to pay with your wrist. But one of the most amazing wearables ever invented is still the microphone. Add in a few embedded artificial intelligence algorithms and it can analyse your voice. Why would you  want your voice to be analysed? Let me explain.

We all know the feeling where something is under our very noses, but we can’t see it. For instance, would you say you know this place? No? Well, you do. It is the inside of a guitar. The same way your voice hides information you can’t see, but artificial intelligence can. It can be proved, by me and other researchers all around the world, that the voice changes when there is a pathology. What do I mean?

Well, your voice features depend on your physiological, psychological and pathological conditions. You can voluntarily change your voice if you are afraid, happy, nervous, or singing or whatever, but you cannot change some feature of your voice that strictly depends on the healthy status of your inner organs: heart, lungs, liver, etc. So, you cannot hear those features, but they do change when conditions present themselves as unhealthy.

VoiceWise is a company able to discriminate healthy versus unhealthy conditions. By analysing the voice of the patients, VoiceWise recognised the condition of that patient by discriminating between different pathologies. As an example, VoiceWise detected Parkinson’s disease within an accuracy as high as 95% and dysphonia with an accuracy as high as 97 per cent.

Really fascinating I'm sure you agree.

Join me in the next video then. Among other things I will be looking how wearables can save lives.

A presto!