New Experimental Wearable Device Could Generate Power From User’s Bending Finger; Create, Store Memories

A new wearable device could revolutionize health monitoring and other technologies. The experimental wearable can do much more than its counterpart in the market.

New Experimental Wearable Device

Researchers have developed an experimental wearable device that generates power from a user's bending finger. Additionally, the device can create and store memories.

A single nanomaterial is used in the invention, which is constructed into a stretchable casing that fits over a person's finger. The device's ability to create power by simply bending a user's finger was made possible by the nanomaterial.

The gadget can also carry out memory tasks because of the ultra-thin material. Multifunctional devices typically need many materials stacked in layers, which presents the time-consuming challenge of carefully stacking nanomaterials.

The team, led by RMIT University and the University of Melbourne, worked with other Australian and foreign institutions to create the proof-of-concept gadget using the safe and well-suited for wearable applications rust of a low-temperature liquid metal known as bismuth.

Incorporating the team's recent work with a similar material that enabled gas sensing, senior lead researcher Dr. Ali Zavabeti said the discovery might be used to make medical wearables that monitor vital signs and memorize individualized data.

Zavabeti, an engineer from RMIT and the University of Melbourne, added that "the innovation was used in our experiments to write, erase, and re-write images in nanoscale, so it could realistically be developed to one day encode bank notes, original art, or authentication services."

According to the team, the researchers' findings show that their creation has "exceptional responsiveness to movements associated with human activities, such as stretching, making it a promising candidate for wearable technologies." With an average output peak of roughly 1 volt, Zavabeti said they examined the behavior of natural motion when the gadget was fastened to a finger joint.

The RMIT logo and a square-shaped emblem were used as examples of the device's ability to "read," "write," and "erase," respectively, memory functions. During these memory tests, the gadget, which a user did not wear, wrote and stored the logo and symbol in a space 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

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Sweatainer - 3D-Printed Wearable Collect, Analyze Sweat

Another amazing wearable made headlines earlier this year. Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa College of Engineering want to make sweat collection and analysis more convenient by designing the 3D-printed wearable dubbed "sweatainer."

According to Tyler Ray, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, 3D printing allows an altogether new design mode for wearable sweat sensors by creating fluidic networks and features with unheard-of complexity. They use 3D printing to demonstrate the many possibilities for the accessible, creative, and economic development of cutting-edge wearable sweat devices using the sweatainer, per Ray.

One of the unique features of the sweatainer is its "multi-draw" sweat collection method, which enables the collection of numerous, distinct sweat samples for analysis either on the device itself or via transmission to a lab.

The innovation was motivated by the vacutainer used for clinical blood sampling. It boosts sweat collection efficiency and opens up new possibilities for at-home testing, saving samples for further research and integrating the device with existing health monitoring methods.