Batter Up
One of America’s most beloved pastimes has received a high-tech upgrade. Starting this season, baseball players can don wearable devices during games to monitor their heart and breathing rate as well as track elbow stress. The devices approved by Major League Baseball, the Zephyr BioHarness and
Motus Baseball Sleeve, track a player’s habits to provide early detection of potential injuries.
Source: Engadget
The Power of Passive Wi-Fi
A team of University of Washington computer scientists and electrical engineers has created a passive Wi-Fi system that consumes 10,000 times less power than conventional methods. This development could help enable the Internet of Things — as traditionally “dumb” devices become connected, they can communicate using Wi-Fi without consuming much more power.
Image courtesy of the University of Washington.
A Vote for Blockchain?
The problems plaguing voting machines have been widely reported as the 2016 General Election nears. A majority of the country’s current machines are outdated and potentially insecure. A possible solution lies within the technology powering the digital currency Bitcoin — blockchain — and one company is taking steps to see that become a reality. Blockchain Technologies Corp. says its blockchain voting machine is secure and transparent. Ballots are scanned by the company’s software and results are uploaded to the blockchain as they’re tabulated, creating an audit trail to back up paper records. While the tech isn’t in use by a government agency yet, the Libertarian Party of Texas State Convention used the system to track its elections in early April.
SOURCE: EconoTimes
gt06-spectrum-3.jpgSafer Surgeries
In response to findings that nearly one-third of patients in low-resource settings, like rural areas and small cities in developing countries, suffer from surgical-site infections, researchers at Rice University developed a way to bring off-grid sterilization to those in need. Called Sterile Box, a sterilization station is built into a standard shipping container and contains all the equipment required to prepare surgical instruments for safe reuse including a water system for decontamination and a solar-powered autoclave for steam sterilization. The box will be tested in a clinical setting next year in Malawi, Africa.
Source: Treehugger. Image by Jeff Fitlow of Rice University.
Elaine Pittman is the former managing editor of Emergency Management magazine.
