WebZine
2016.11
What's New
Wearable Glove for Disabled Patients
Posted 25 April 2016 | 18:17 GMT
Tasks such as opening doors are a part of everyday life for most people. However, for people who people suffer paralysis of the hand and fingers through injuries or diseases – such as spinal cord injury, stroke and cerebral palsy – they can present a huge challenge without the support of assistive technologies.
About 500,000 people end up in a wheelchair each year. Of those, around half also suffer injuries to their hand. And that number doesn’t include the people who sustain injuries just to their hands. People with disability want to live an independent life
Flexible, Portable Terahertz Scanner Made From Carbon Nanotubes
By Charles Q. Choi
Posted 14 Nov 2016 | 16:14 GMT
Terahertz radiation can peer through objects to spot hidden items and analyze their chemistry, but today’s terahertz detectors are typically inflexible and bulky. Now scientists in Japan have for the first time created a portable, flexible, wearable terahertz scanner in order to better image objects with curves, including the human body.
Terahertz rays, which lie between the infrared and microwave bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, can pass through a wide variety of materials without damaging them. As such, terahertz cameras have great potential for noninvasive, high-resolution imaging. Promising applications include revealing hidden weapons, identifying explosives, and checking for defects in machined parts, among others.
However, conventional terahertz imaging technologies “use inflexible materials and therefore are adaptable only to flat samples,” says Yukio Kawano at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. So these imagers encounter difficulties when scanning most real-life samples—which possess 3D curvature—greatly limiting their use, he says. For instance, terahertz scanners at security checkpoints need to rotate detectors 360 degrees around human bodies to image them, a necessity that makes these systems very bulky.
To address this, Kyujin Cho at Seoul National University has developed the Exo-Glove Poly, a soft wearable robot that addresses paralysis of the hand by enabling people to grasp and pinch various objects. Exo is from the Greek for ‘outside’ and Poly refers to the glove’s being made of polymer. Inspired by human fingers, this flexible, rubber-like robotic glove is superior to bulky exoskeletons due to its lightweight compactness and increased usability.
Built so that it’s comfortable enough to be worn every day and waterproof for easy sanitisation, Exo-Glove Poly has three fingers that fit over the wearer’s thumb, index finger and middle finger, with a soft tendon routing system of wires. The motor, controlled by a simple switch, pulls on the wires to open and close the hand. Design features allow adjustment to different hand sizes and to protect users from injury, as well as taking into consideration price, mass production, wearability and appearance.
The device was developed through a unique and inspiring cooperation of students with disabled persons. The team hope that more people with disability will be able to live a better independent life, but most of all, the goal of the SNU Biorobotics Lab is to foster and educate innovative and empathetic researchers to become agents of change for the future.
Kawano and his colleagues devised their new flexible terahertz imaging device from films of carbon nanotubes, which are pipes of carbon only nanometers or billionths of a meter wide. At room temperature, their imager could detect a wide band of terahertz rays, ranging in frequency from 0.14 to 39 terahertz. This work marks "the first realization of a flexible terahertz camera," Kawano says.
The scientists developed portable terahertz scanners that they could wrap around objects. Using these scanners, they could image hidden items such as metal washers or paper clips concealed behind paper sheets or germanium plates or find a piece of chewing gum hidden in a plastic box. They could also identify metal impurities in a plastic bottle and a break in a syringe. These findings suggest this scanner could find use in “high-speed and multi-view inspections of industrial products, especially non-flat samples,” such as plastic bottles and pharmaceutical products, Kawano says.