WebZine
2019. 2
What's New
Smart tattoos turn your skin into a health tracker
Who needs a smartwatch when ink can do the trick?
There's a common problem with health-tracking devices like smartwatches: they're not really attached to you, which leaves you relying on a short-lived battery and a wireless connection. Even a self-powered patch has its limits. That's where Harvard and MIT think they can help: they've developed smart tattoos that effectively place health sensors in your skin, no power or wireless link required. The ink in the tattoos reacts to the chemical composition of your interstitial fluid, which reflects the state of your blood. A green ink grows more intense to let athletes know when they're dehydrated, while another green ink turns brown to warn diabetics when their glucose levels go up.
And unlike that tattoo you got on a wild night in college, you're not stuck with it. With enough refinement, the scientists expect to make tattoos that only last for as long as you need them. They could be invisible unless subjected to certain kinds of light, too, so you wouldn't have to explain your ink to your friends. if you weren't sure what the symbols on your arm meant, a smartphone app could analyze them to tell you exactly how you're doing.
It could be a long while before you're sporting tattoos that are as informative as they are decorative. The project is as much about inspiring "potential" among both artists and scientists, as well as to address ethical questions. If your tattoo is visible, are you comfortable with the idea of everyone seeing your blood sugar level the moment you put on a short-sleeved shirt? Look at it this way, though: if you're tired of strapping devices to your arms or wrists just to quantify your health, this could be much more comfortable.
VR Therapy Makes Arachnophobes Braver Around Real Spiders
Immersive 3D video exposure helps people overcome arachnophobia
A woman with a fear of spiders sits in a chair wearing a virtual reality headset. She watches 3D video footage of a tarantula walking over what seems like her hand. Then the spider creeps toward her face. She watches the 5-minute video six times.
It sounds like torture, but the video is supposed to help. The idea is to repeatedly, but safely, expose a person to the thing she fears until she no longer fears it. Doctors have long used the treatment, called exposure therapy, to help alleviate their patients’ phobias.
Traditionally, therapists deliver the treatment live. They’ll present spiders to people with arachnophobia, and blood to people with hemophobia. But live exposure therapy is harder to deliver to people who fear things that can’t be brought into an office building, like airplanes (aerophobia) or large animals (zoophobia).
So in recent years, researchers have used computer generated imagery (CGI) and virtual reality (VR) to deliver exposure therapy to people with phobias. The patient faces her fears in the safety of a virtual world.
It seems to work. “There is evidence that computer generated virtual reality is as effective or almost as effective as [live] treatment for anxiety disorders,” says Emily Carl, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, who is studying the therapy. “But you run the risk of it not being quite real and that being distracting,” she says, referring to the “uncanny valley” effect of CGI. “Say you have a room full of [computer generated] people listening to you for social anxiety. If they’re not quite humanlike, but they’re close, you might end up focusing on that, and that weirding you out in a way that’s not necessarily helpful for treatment.”
Carl is part of a group of researchers at University of Texas at Austin who say 3D video footage of real stimuli, delivered through a VR headset, may treat phobias as well as, or better than, CGI. To test this hypothesis, the researchers created a 3D spider-viewing experience and tested it on 77 college students who have a fear of spiders.
The results: After being immersed in the 3D video, the students were braver when faced with a real spider. And it was a big one: a Chilean rose hair tarantula. The researchers published their findings this month in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders. The study was conceived and led by Sean Minns, now a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University.
In the 3D video, the tarantula crawls over a hand and creeps closer and closer to the viewer. It’s like a scene from the 1990 horror flick Arachnophobia, only therapeutic, because nothing bad happens.
“You could see how physically uncomfortable the participants were,” says Minns. “As the spider got closer, people would recoil.” That’s a good thing, because it means the immersive experience of it being 3D made it feel real, he says.
The team made the videos using a stereoscopic 3D dual-camera rig, in which two cameras, positioned to mimic the natural distance between the eyes, shoot footage simultaneously. The footage from the cameras are projected onto the left and right lenses of an unmodified Oculus Rift DK1 VR headset, creating a sense of depth to the viewer.