Turning workers into 'super workers' with robotic suits 02-14

If you've watched the Iron Man film franchise, you'll know that a powered suit gives inventor Tony Stark superhuman strength to fight the bad guys.

But away from the the fictional world of blockbusting movies, robotic exoskeletons offer more prosaic and useful help for humans.

The military has been in on the act for years, using them to help soldiers carry more weight for longer periods of time. Meanwhile manufacturers have been busy creating robotic suits to give mobility to people with disabilities.

But now exoskeletons are becoming an important part of the scene in more conventional workplaces, mainly because of their unique offering.

"Exoskeletons act as a bridge between fully-manual labour and robotic systems. You get the brains of people in the body of a robot," says Dan Kara, research director at ABI Research.

"But there's more to it than that. You can tie the use of exoskeletons to business benefits that are very easy to quantify. The main one is a reduction in work-related injuries, and we know that outside the common cold, back injury is the main reason people are off work."

The motor industry has used robots for many years. But robots can't do everything, points out technical expert Marty Smets, of Ford's human systems and virtual manufacturing unit.

"In our plants, we see a need for both people and robots," he says.

Some Ford assembly line workers lift their arms up to 4,600 times a day - that's about a million times a year. That sort of repetition leaves many suffering from back-ache and neck pain.

Now, though, the company has equipped staff at two US assembly plants with a device called the EksoVest, from California-based Ekso Bionics. It helps take the strain by giving workers an extra 5-15lb (2.2-6.8kg) of lift per arm.

"Incredible is the only word to describe the vest," said Paul Collins, an assembly line worker at Ford Michigan assembly plant. "It has made my job significantly easier and has given me more energy throughout the day."

The company says it's already seeing a dramatic decline in work-related injuries and is now planning to introduce the exoskeletons at facilities in Europe and South America.

Currently, the industrial use of exoskeletons is relatively small - this year only a few thousand have been sold, says ABI's Kara. But, he says, the potential market could be in the millions.

The types of exoskeleton used for rehabilitation can cost more than $100,000 (£75,000), needing, as they usually do, to replace a user's muscles altogether. However, industrial versions can be far cheaper, at around $5,000.

They generally augment human strength rather than replace it and tend to enhance one part of the body only. They also often don't need any external power. Instead, they can deliver a 10-20% boost to the user's lifting power by transferring weight to the ground.

In Japan, exoskeletons are being used for heavy lifting in the shipbuilding industry as well as in large commercial construction projects.

Meanwhile, US retailer Home Depot is testing exoskeletons to help workers unload trucks and bring materials onto the floor.

Another early adopter is Lockheed Martin, which is using its own Fortis exoskeleton to allow workers to operate tools for much longer periods. It has a support structure that transfers the weight of heavy loads from the operator's body directly to the ground through a series of joints at the hips, knees and ankles.

It can also be used with an arm that supports the weight of a tool helps isolate vibration and torque kick - rotational force - from the user. Workers using the devices, says Lockheed Martin, report two-thirds less fatigue, with higher quality work, greater productivity and fewer musculoskeletal injuries.

Other companies are producing powered industrial exoskeletons that are rather more like the suits from the movies. Sarcos, for example, offers three models, with the biggest - the Guardian GT (pictured) - handling more than 450kg with its 2m (7ft) arms.

"I think powered exoskeletons will become ubiquitous for industrial applications around the world. These devices will materially reduce occupational injuries while also dramatically improving productivity," says chief executive officer Ben Wolff.

"Additionally, these devices can extend the useful life of an aging work force, and can make jobs open for more people that previously could have only been handled by people of larger physical stature." 

Other augmentation technologies are even stranger. Researchers at Cornell's Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, for example, have developed a robotic "third arm" that attaches to the user's elbow. The group says it sees applications in package handling, warehouses, and even restaurants.

"A third arm device would enhance a worker's reach, and allow them to access objects without having to reach or bend. This would be useful in pick-and-place tasks where the worker is moving, such as retrieving packages from warehouse shelves," says researcher Vighnesh Vatsal.

"It would also provide support in assembly tasks in challenging environments such as construction sites, for instance by holding a work piece steady while a worker operates on it with power tools using their own hands."

In the longer term, industry experts say the price of exoskeletons will fall further, meaning they could move into many more areas of work. They could even find a place in private life, with applications in DIY, gardening and sports such as hiking.

So while we'll never be likely to be able to emulate the exploits of comic book heroes, exoskeletons could help with mundane household chores such as ironing. So not so much Iron Man - more "ironing man", perhaps? 

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This Tattoo ink changes colour to tell the person, if he/she is dehydrated or diabetic. 10-03

Harvard and MIT researchers have developed smart tattoo ink capable of monitoring health by changing color to tell an athlete if she is dehydrated or a diabetic if his blood sugar rises.
The work, conducted by two postdoctoral fellows at Harvard Medical School and colleagues led by Katia Vega at MIT’s Media Lab, paired biosensitive inks developed at Harvard with traditional tattoo artistry as a way to overcome some of the limitations of current biomedical monitoring devices.
“We were thinking: New technologies, what is the next generation after wearables?” said Ali Yetisen, who is a Tosteson postdoctoral fellow at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital. “And so we came up with the idea that we could incorporate biosensors in the skin.”


The Dermal Abyss (d-abyss) presents an approach to biointerfaces in which the body surface is rendered as an interactive display by patterning biosensors into the skin to produce color changes in response to biomarker variations in the interstitial fluid. It combines advances in biotechnology with traditional methods in tattoo artistry. d-abyss is designed to use the aesthetics, permanence, and visible nature of tattoos to encode information. In the present work, we replace traditional inks with colorimetric and fluorescent biosensors that can report on the concentration of sodium, glucose, and pH in the interstitial fluid of the skin. We report the preliminary evaluation of these biosensors in an ex vivo skin model, assessing their visibility from the dermis. We describe different applications of d-abyss in the medical, lifestyle, and security domains. This work is a proof of concept of a platform in which the skin reveals information inside the body, tattoos form wearable displays within the skin, and the body's metabolism works as an input for the d-abyss biosensors.

A drawback of current wearable monitoring devices is that they don’t seamlessly integrate with the body, Yetisen said. Short battery life is a concern and so is the need for wireless connectivity, neither of which is an issue with the simple, color-based interface of biosensitive tattoo ink.
“We wanted to go beyond what is available through wearables today,” Yetisen said.

Nan Jiang, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the project, “Dermal Abyss,” was conducted as a proof of concept, and that further refinements — stabilizing ink so designs don’t fade or diffuse into surrounding tissue — would be needed for a medical product.

The Dermal Abyss tattoo inks change color according to the chemistry of the body’s interstitial fluid, which can be used as a surrogate for constituents of the blood. Inks developed so far change from green to brown as glucose concentration increases. The team also developed a green ink, viewable under blue light, that grows more intense as sodium concentration rises, an indication of dehydration. Researchers tattooed the inks onto segments of pig skin and noted how they changed color or intensity in response to different biomarkers.

Jiang and Yetisen said that once the bugs are worked out, the applications for biologically-sensitive ink are fairly broad. Inks, Yetisen said, could be incorporated into long-lasting tattoos for chronic conditions or into temporary designs for shorter-duration monitoring. Ink can even be invisible, Yetisen said, readable under only particular kinds of light. That light could come from something as ubiquitous as a smartphone.

Yetisen has already developed an app that can analyze a picture of a sensor and provide quantitative diagnostic results. While patients are an obvious potential market, Yetisen said the technology could be used in astronauts, for whom continuous health monitoring is desirable.

Jiang said the project’s purpose was to excite artists and scientists alike about the potential for such technology, and to stimulate discussion of ethical issues it might raise, such as people’s willingness to have health information displayed for all to see.

“The purpose of the work is to light the imagination of biotechnologists and stimulate public support for such efforts,” Jiang said. “These questions of how technology impacts our lives must be considered as carefully as the design of the molecular sensors patients may someday carry embedded in their skin.”





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6 reasons why we’re underhyping the Internet of Things 06-25

6 reasons why we’re underhyping the Internet of Things

Just when you thought the Internet of Things couldn’t possibly live up to its hype, along comes a blockbuster, 142-page report from McKinsey Global Institute (“The Internet of Things: Mapping the Value Beyond the Hype”) that says, if anything, we’re underestimating the potential economic impact of the Internet of Things. By 2025, says McKinsey, the potential economic impact of having “sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems” (McKinsey’s definition of the Internet of Things) could be more than $11 trillion annually.

According to McKinsey, there are six reasons we may be underhyping the Internet of Things.

1. We’re only using 1 percent of all data

What McKinsey found in its analysis of more than 150 Internet of Things use cases was that we’re simply not taking advantage of all the data that sensors and RFID tags are cranking out 24/7. In some cases, says McKinsey, we may be using only 1 percent of all the data out there. And even then, we’re only using the data for simple things such as anomaly detection and control systems – we’re not taking advantage of the other 99 percent of the data for tasks such as optimization and prediction. A typical offshore oil rig, for example, may have 30,000 sensors hooked up to it, but oil companies are only using a small fraction of this data for future decision-making.

2. We’re not getting the big picture by focusing only on industries

Rather than focusing on verticals and industries (the typical way that potential economic value is computed), McKinsey takes a deeper look at the sweeping changes taking place in nine different physical “settings” where the Internet of Things will actually be deployed – home, retail, office, factories, work sites (mining, oil and gas, construction), vehicles, human (health and wellness), outside (logistics and navigation), and cities. Of that $11 trillion in economic value, four of the nine settings top out at over $1 trillion in projected economic value – factories ($3.7 trillion), cities ($1.7 trillion), health and fitness ($1.6 trillion) and retail ($1.2 trillion).

Thus, instead of focusing on, say, the automotive industry, McKinsey spreads the benefits of the Internet of Things for automobiles over two different physical settings — “vehicles” and “cities.” In the case of vehicles, sensors are a natural fit for maintenance (e.g. sensors that tell you when something’s not working on your car). In the case of cities, these sensors can help with bigger issues such as traffic congestion.

3. We’re forgetting about the B2B opportunity

If you think the Internet of Things is just about smart homes and wearable fitness devices, think again – McKinsey says the B2B market opportunity could be more than two times the size of the B2C opportunity. One big example cited by McKinsey is the ability of work sites to take better advantage of the Internet of Things.

Think of an oil work site, for example. You have machinery (e.g. oil rigs), mobile equipment (trucks), consumables (barrels of oil), employees, processing plants and transportation networks for taking this oil out of the work site. If all those elements are talking to each via the Internet, you can optimize the work site. Oil rigs can let employees know if something’s broken, trucks can arrive on time to pick up the barrels of oil, and then all that oil can be processed and shipped off to wherever it’s needed on time and on schedule.

4. We’re ignoring that “interoperability” could be the new “synergy”

According to McKinsey, approximately 40 percent of the total economic value of the Internet of Things is driven by the ability of all the physical devices to talk to each other via computers — what McKinsey refers to as “interoperability.” You can think of “interoperability” as a new form of synergy – a way to increase the whole without increasing the sum of the parts.

If machines can’t talk to each other, says McKinsey, the Internet of Things might only be a $3.9 trillion opportunity. One example of interoperability is the ability of your brand-new fitness wearable to talk with your hospital or healthcare provider. What good is your fitness device if it can’t communicate with the people who can actually use all that data? With interoperability in health, the Internet of Things may be able to cut the cost of treating chronic disease by 50 percent.

5. We’re underestimating the impact on developing economies

In terms of pure economic impact, there will be approximately a 60:40 split between economic gains for developed economies and developing economies. As McKinsey points out, some of the greatest gains will be in developing nations, especially in areas such as retail. In some cases, developing nations will be able to leapfrog the achievements in developed nations because they don’t have to worry about retrofitting equipment or infrastructure with sensors and actuators.

6. We’re forgetting about the new business models that will be created

It’s not just that the Internet of Things will lead to efficiencies and cost savings – but also that it will lead to entirely new ways of doing business. As McKinsey points out, we will likely see the rise of new business models that correspond with the way we are monitoring and evaluating data in real-time. The line will blur between technology companies and non-technology companies.

For example, take the makers of industrial equipment. Instead of selling expensive capital goods, they will sell products-as-services. Instead of charging one lump sum upfront, they will charge by usage. In addition, there will be new companies that emerge that bill themselves as end-to-end Internet of Things system providers.

**

Obviously, it’s exciting news that the world is about to get an $11 trillion economic shot in the arm from hooking up every possible object to the Internet with sensors and actuators. At the very least, some companies are going to get awfully rich by selling sensors and RFID tags to everyone trying to cash in on the Internet of Things gold rush.

At the same time, though, isn’t there something very bleak about a future in which sensors are hooked up to every object, every setting is predictable and optimized, and pure data guides every decision rather than the human heart? Imagine a giant planned economy, overseen by a bunch of managers schooled in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management, figuring out new ways to crunch the data of our daily lives. When it comes to the Internet of Things, be careful what you wish for.

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The New Analytics Imperative 12-29

The New Analytics Imperative

Cisco today announced a data and analytics strategy and a suite of analytics software that will enable customers to translate their data into actionable business insight regardless of where the data resides.

With the number of connected devices projected to grow from 10 billion today to 50 billion by 2020, the flood tide of new data — widely distributed and often unstructured — is disrupting traditional data management and analytics. Traditionally most organizations created data inside their own four walls and saved it in a centralized repository. This made it easy to analyze the data and extract valuable information to make better business decisions.

But the arrival of the Internet of Everything (IoE) — the hyper-connection of people, process, data, and things – is quickly changing all that. The amount of data is huge. It’s coming from widely disparate sources (like mobile devices, sensors, or remote routers), and much of that data is being created at the edge. Organizations can now get data from everywhere — from every device and at any time — to answer questions about their markets and customers that they never could before. But IT managers and key decision makers are struggling to find the useful business nuggets from this mountain of data.

As an example, take the typical offshore oil rig, which generates up to 2 terabytes of data per day. The majority of this data is time sensitive to both production and safety. Yet it can take up to 12 days to move a single day’s worth of data from its source at the network edge back to the data center or cloud. This means that analytics at the edge are critical to knowing what’s going on when it’s happening now, not almost 2 weeks later.

The case for analytics at the edge is not solely driven by bandwidth constraints. In many cases the data being analyzed simply has a useful life shorter than the time it takes to send the data to a central place for analysis. Location-based information is a perfect example. When someone (or something) is on the move, location-based information is only valid for a brief point in time.  Much of this data today is never analyzed at all because centralized analytics can’t provide insight quickly enough.

This scenario – repeated continuously in companies around the globe – has led to what I call “the Analytics Imperative” – the ability to extract meaning and outcomes in a world where 99.5% of the data collected is never analyzed.

Organizations need new strategies for analyzing these massive data sets. It is no longer viable to move 100% of your data to centralized data stores for analysis, as the examples above illustrate. Instead, customers today need solutions that enable real-time analysis to take place anywhere from the data lake or data warehouse to the edge of the network, including data in motion. The reality of IoE is that turning massive volumes of data into useful information will require analytics from the cloud to the data center to the very edge of the network.

Data and analytics will be the means by which value is extracted from the Internet of Everything. This explains why Cisco has entered the business of data and analytics in a big way with the introduction of Connected Analytics, pre-packaged analytics software ready for integration into existing Cisco infrastructures to enable powerful industry solutions. Why Cisco, you may be asking.

• Connected infrastructure: Only Cisco has the connected infrastructure from the cloud to the data center to the edge to enable analytics everywhere
• Agile pervasive data access: market-leading data virtualization capabilities  to leverage even the most distributed data

• Real-time, streaming analytics at the edge: streaming analytic capabilities built right into our industrialized routers

• The ability to leverage your existing infrastructure:Distributed analytics can be done either in NEW infrastructure or in EXISTING infrastructure. Using the intelligent Cisco infrastructure already in place dramatically reduces deployment and ongoing costs and significantly decreases time to deploy

• Deep domain infrastructure expertise:  Nobody can understand network data better than Cisco; pairing that data with enterprise data can provide insights that aren’t possible without the network data, and THAT is where Cisco has created strength in our analytics.

• Intercloud integration of private/public
•  clouds:

• Enables organizations to draw insights from data stored in both private and public cloud environments

• Broad ecosystem of partners: 

• Strategic partnerships have been critical to Cisco’s success over the past 30 years and continue to be so in the data and analytics space; from Hadoop partners to analytics partners, our customer solutions leverage a full stack of best-of-breed technologies from Cisco and our partners

Cisco approaches big data and analytics in a way no other company can, leveraging our strengths in hardware, software, services, and partnerships to embed powerful analytic capabilities from the data center to the cloud to the edge, providing insights across the most distributed and remote data.

The Analytics Imperative? We get it. And we are here to help you extract value from your data in ways no other vendor can. To learn more about Cisco Connected Analytics for the Internet of Everything, visit this site.

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