sensor

Engineers at Mountain View, Calif.-based SST have come up with technology that uses acoustic sensors to help police pinpoint the exactly location of a gunshot as soon has it goes off.

SmartPlanet visited the San Francisco Police Department to see SST's gunfire-detection software in action.

This video first appeared at SmartPlanet under the headline "Acoustics technology alerts police of gun violence."

iPhone 4S users have been able to enjoy conversations with Siri. But owners of older iPhones have no Siri to talk to. Why?

Tearing down the iPhone 4S, the gurus at iFixit believe that Siri's absence on older phones is connected to changes in the proximity sensor used in the new iPhone.

The proximity sensor judges when your face is near the phone so it can dim the display and disable the keyboard. In past model iPhones, it turns on only during a call and then turn offs when the call is completed.

But Siri also makes use of … Read more

I know enough French to order two croissants and buy a bottle of wine. That successfully got me through a week in Paris, but I could improve my skills astronomically if I got a French Digital Kitchen.

Newcastle University in England has installed this kitchen, which is designed to helps students learn a language and gain some cooking skills at the same time. PBS should be all over this.

Everything from the mixing bowls to the peelers to the flour and sugar have embedded sensors that work under the same concept as a Nintendo Wii. The computer knows where the tools are and what motions are being made.

The computer gives you instructions in French and tracks your progress as you work your way through a recipe. It's like a GPS for making crepes and Croque Monsieur.… Read more

Researchers at Stanford are developing new sensors so flexible and pressure-sensitive that they could be used to make touch-sensitive prosthetic limbs, pressure-sensitive badges, and more.

By incorporating a transparent film of carbon nano-springs, the sensor "can register pressure ranging from a firm pinch between your thumb and forefinger to twice the pressure exerted by an elephant standing on one foot," says postdoctoral researcher Darren Lipomi, co-author of a paper published October 23 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. "None of it causes any permanent deformation."

The team built those nano-springs by airbrushing nanotubes (which are in liquid … Read more

You may not have been happy when Apple released the iPhone 4S instead of an iPhone 5, but a lot of case makers were. That's because at first glance their existing iPhone 4 cases seemed to work just fine with the new model, which meant that they didn't have to scramble to create new designs and had a ready supply of cases available for the 4S.

But that was before someone noticed that Apple had made a small but somewhat crucial design change: it moved the ambient-light sensor a few millimeters to the left. That created a problem … Read more

What do you get when you combine an Android smartphone, cell phone image sensor, Lego building blocks, and a handful of Caltech engineers and biologists? The ePetri, which isn't Petri Dish 2.0, but a full reworking of a technology that dates back to the late 1800s.

Traditionally, the Petri dish (named after German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri) has been used in the medical field to identify bacterial infections by studying samples via microscope as the cultured cells grow in an incubator.

The Caltech researchers have a few choice words for such an approach in 2011, including "expensive," "labor-intensive," and "suboptimal." So they set out to improve not just the dish, but the entire process.… Read more

A huge image sensor that Canon showed off last year turns out to have more of a purpose in life than touting the company's manufacturing prowess. It's being used to help a Japanese observatory hunt for meteors.

Canon's 202x205mm sensor dwarfs the 24x36mm "full-frame" sensors that are used commercially in the company's high-end SLR cameras. When Canon touted the giant sensor last year, it said, "Potential applications for the new high-sensitivity CMOS sensor include the video recording of stars in the night sky and nocturnal animal behavior."

Well, it looks like those … Read more

Engineers at the University of Illinois today unveiled novel, skin-mounted electronics this week whose circuitry bends, wrinkles, and even stretches with skin.

The device platform includes electronic components, medical diagnostics, communications, and human-machine interfacing on a patch so thin and durable it can be mounted to skin much like a temporary tattoo.

What's more, the team was able to demonstrate its invention across a wide range of components, including LEDs, transistors, wireless antennas, sensors, and conductive coils and solar cells for power.

"We threw everything in our bag of tricks onto that platform, and then added a few … Read more

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati have created a disposable lab-on-a-chip sensor that can test levels of potentially harmful heavy metals in humans in as few as 10 minutes.

Their work, published in the August issue of the journal Biomedical Microdevices, is co-authored by assistant professor of environmental engineering Erin Haynes, who has also been studying air pollution and the effects of lead and manganese on residents in Marietta, Ohio--home to the only manganese refinery in the U.S. and Canada. (Manganese compounds are used to make steel and other products.)

Manganese is naturally ubiquitous and considered essential both nutritionally … Read more