Fitbit's devices from recent years have blood oxygen monitoring (SpO2) hardware, but they haven't used it -- until now. Users on Reddit and elsewhere have noticed that their Versa, Ionic and Charge 3 devices are suddenly (if sometimes temporarily) pr...
You clearly buy a Fitbit smartwatch for its fitness tracking, and the company wants to be sure you wring the most out of that tentpole feature. It just released a Fitbit OS 3.0 update for the Ionic and Versa that provides both more fitness info and...
Fitbit knows it can't lean on activity trackers forever, and it's going to shake things up in 2018. As part of a call discussing its latest earnings, the company said it would produce a "family" of smartwatches this year -- it's not just going to ho...
Half a year back, my daughter suddenly stopped sleeping through the night, meaning that my wife and I stopped sleeping as well. No fancy bedroom gadget, or anything else, has alleviated the terrible fog that clouds our brains after an average of four...
Sportswear brands might be reviving their interest in fitness technology, but Adidas is staging its comeback in a very roundabout way. The company's American segment is closing its dedicated digital sports division and folding the group's work into...
Fitbit's Ionic smartwatch suffers from a dearth of apps, we noted in our Engadget review, but the wearable firm is trying to flip that equation with an update to its Fitbit OS. It brings over 100 new watch faces and 60 apps, including Yelp, Nest, Hue...
Convenient contactless and mobile payment options are a dime a dozen these days, but that isn't discouraging Fitbit from throwing its keys into the bowl. After launching in the US and elsewhere during recent weeks, Fitbit Pay is now live in the UK, i...
The small TEC.BEAN Mini Air Purifier is currently the top new release in Home Air Ionizers on Amazon. The USB and battery powered Air purifier neutralizes or eliminates unpleasant odors and...
We’ve featured a sound system called the Transparent Speaker, which really only has a glass case. Two post-doctoral fellows at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) made an actual transparent speaker. It’s stretchable too. But the loudspeaker is not an electronic device; it’s an ionic device.
Instead of electrons, Jeong-Yun Sun and Christoph Keplinger’s speaker uses ions in an electrolyte to transport electric charge. The speaker is made of a thin and transparent sheet of rubber sandwiched between two layers of polyacrylamide gel filled with saltwater. When a high-voltage current is passed through these layers, the rubber sheet acts as a diaphragm. Harvard SEAS reports that this clear device can produce any sound in the “entire audible spectrum”, from 20Hz to 20KHz.
The speaker demonstrates two of the key advantages of an ionic device over an electronic device – transparency and elasticity – but there’s a third benefit: biocompatibility. Ionic devices are easier to incorporate into living creatures compared to electronics. They may also be used to create what Keplinger calls soft machines: “Engineered ionic systems can achieve a lot of functions that our body has: they can sense, they can conduct a signal, and they can actuate movement. We’re really approaching the type of soft machine that biology has to offer.”
With that kind of potential, it’s not surprising that there have been previous efforts to make ionic conductors for practical use. Harvard SEAS explained that ionic conductors are prone to undergoing chemical reactions – including, uhm, combustion – when exposed to high voltage, and that ions move slower through a circuit compared to electrons due to their size and weight. Fortunately, Sun and Keplinger’s ionic conductor “overcomes both of these problems.” You can read the full report on Harvard SEAS’ website.
IBM is worried that we're reaching the end of the road for CMOS technology -- that we need new materials beyond silicon to keep the power draw down in chips as their performance goes up. It may keep future circuitry extra-lean through a new technique that puts a metal oxide in silicon's place and allows for non-volatile processors and memory. By running ionized liquid electrolytes in currents through the oxide, the company can switch that oxide from an insulator to a conductor (and vice versa) that can reliably maintain its state, even when there's no power. The trick would let a logic gate or switch kick into action only when there's an event, rather than needing constant jolts of electricity -- and without the pressure or temperature changes that had ruled out metal oxides for chips in the past. We're still far from replacing silicon with more efficient oxides given the early state of IBM's work, but having a consistent method is an important first step.
Fitbit's devices from recent years have blood oxygen monitoring (SpO2) hardware, but they haven't used it -- until now. Users on Reddit and elsewhere have noticed that their Versa, Ionic and Charge 3 devices are suddenly (if sometimes temporarily) pr...
You clearly buy a Fitbit smartwatch for its fitness tracking, and the company wants to be sure you wring the most out of that tentpole feature. It just released a Fitbit OS 3.0 update for the Ionic and Versa that provides both more fitness info and...
Fitbit knows it can't lean on activity trackers forever, and it's going to shake things up in 2018. As part of a call discussing its latest earnings, the company said it would produce a "family" of smartwatches this year -- it's not just going to ho...
Half a year back, my daughter suddenly stopped sleeping through the night, meaning that my wife and I stopped sleeping as well. No fancy bedroom gadget, or anything else, has alleviated the terrible fog that clouds our brains after an average of four...
Sportswear brands might be reviving their interest in fitness technology, but Adidas is staging its comeback in a very roundabout way. The company's American segment is closing its dedicated digital sports division and folding the group's work into...
Fitbit's Ionic smartwatch suffers from a dearth of apps, we noted in our Engadget review, but the wearable firm is trying to flip that equation with an update to its Fitbit OS. It brings over 100 new watch faces and 60 apps, including Yelp, Nest, Hue...
Convenient contactless and mobile payment options are a dime a dozen these days, but that isn't discouraging Fitbit from throwing its keys into the bowl. After launching in the US and elsewhere during recent weeks, Fitbit Pay is now live in the UK, i...
