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Tattletale tooth sensor tells your doctor if you've been smoking or overeating
It's official: humans suck at self-discipline so much, researchers thought it necessary to create a tooth sensor that detects if you're smoking or stuffing your face and can tell doctors about it. The National Taiwan University Team led by Hao-hua Chu recently tested prototypes by gluing them to eight people's dentures. Thanks to the device's accelerometers, it was able to differentiate between chewing, smoking, speaking and coughing 94 percent of the time. It would've been better if it could also distinguish healthy food from not, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. After all, the scientists first have to develop an onboard power source (the prototypes required external batteries) and mouth-safe Bluetooth connectivity to transmit data to smartphones. Also, the team wants to shrink the already-teensy sensor down so it can fit inside cavities or on crowns. We don't know about you, but we might choose between cavity-healing gel or these high tech fillings in the future.
Intel Labs developing 'talking' tail lights for safer roads, we go eyes-on (video)
Smarter headlights could guide you out of a rainstorm, but intelligent tail lights could enable communication between vehicles. At least, that's the idea behind a collaborative Connected Vehicle Safety project between Intel and National Taiwan University. Its purpose is so that you'll be able to know just what the vehicles around you are up to -- whether they're speeding or braking or making a left -- by receiving data from their tail lights. Your vehicle could then stop or accelerate automatically without you needing to intervene, or you could choose to react manually if desired. We saw a demonstration of the concept at a Research @ Intel event in San Francisco with a couple of scooters, so head on past the break to learn how it all works, with video to boot.
Intel funnels $40 million into global network of research laboratories
Like any tech company worth its weight in silicon, Intel puts plenty of cash into research, often partnering with outside labs and schools that are less concerned with turning every project into a multi-billion dollar product. After throwing $30 million at Carnegie Mellon last year to open two new labs, Chipzilla is investing $40 million more in a global network of university research centers. Over the next five years that money will be rolled out to what the company is calling, Intel Collaborative Research Institutes (ICRI). The ICRI are based on the same premise as Intel's Science and Technology Centers, like those opened at Mellon, except with a global reach. Two existing labs, the Intel Visual Computing Institute at Saarland University and the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center at National Taiwan University are being rolled into the program. In addition, three new centers are being opened up, including ICRIs for Sustainable Connected Cities in the United Kingdom, Secure Computing at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and Computational Intelligence at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. For more info on what sort or work they'll be doing at the various labs check out the PR after the break.
Another augmented reality, pico-projecting lamp threatens desktops, brings tablet reinforcements (video)
How long have dumblamps been ruling our desktops for? Their reign of evenly scattered light might finally be coming to a close. A few months back it was MIT student Natan Linder putting a pico projector in a lamp to create LuminAR. Now, researcher Li-Wei Chan from National Taiwan University has crafted something similar, again with a pico projector replacing a bulb, this time relying on an IR camera to detect position. The lamp projects an image into a surface that users can interact with, while tablets (also augmented with use IR cameras) can be used to display a 3D view of the 2D projected content, allowing a user to look around and zoom in dynamically. The voice-over in the video below talks of potential military applications, generals analyzing battlefields, but for once we'd like to think that this sort of thing would be used for peace. You know, planning nature walks, watching virtual horsies romp around in a pretend field, that sort of thing.
