Wearables no longer refer only to fashion on the runways of Paris. Wearables will be on parade at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, 2015. Devices that snuggle into fabrics, wrap around your wrist or stick to your tummy make people into walking displays of cutting edge technology.

When you talk about wearables, you’ll hear about MEMS (micro-electro mechanical systems). One definition says: MEMS is the integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics on a common silicon substrate through microfabrication technology. You can learn more at a CES Conference Track running from 9am – 4:30pm on January 6, 2015.

Early this year, one research firm noted that the global wearable technology market was $750.0 million USD in 2012 and is expected to reach $5.8 billion in 2018. Not everyone agrees. In fact, a panel of analysts will chew on that prediction in the Venetian’s Marco Polo room.

Another presentation will be about Valencell’s PerformTek, sensor technology based on more than 20 patents, that measures real-time biometric data. Tiny optomechanical sensor modules are embedded in earbuds to provide information for gaming, performance coaching, and fitness training. The blood flow, heart rate monitoring technology removes extraneous noise to provide accurate readings. The sensor module includes an optical emitter, an optical detector, specialized optomechanics, and an accelerometer. It should be interesting to hear Dr. Steven LeBoeuf, President, explain the product during the conference.

Smart watches to wearables have been providing information about our movements and our bodies. From information comes knowledge. But what good is knowledge if we don’t act upon it? That’s where Ben Waber, CEO of Sociometric Solutions comes in. He analyzes communication patterns identified by social sensing technology. Coming at it with a PhD from the Human Dynamics Group at the MIT Media Lab, Waber translates information into suggestions for improving how employees work and collaborate.

Sociometrics Dashboard graphs information for use by organizations wanting to improve employee performance.

Wearable Sociometric Badges capture face-to-face interactions and extract social signals from speech and body movement and by measuring the proximity of each individual. Waber’s talk will incorporate ideas from his book People Analytics.

Discussions will also address how OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and embedded systems integrators can take advantage of MEMS and sensors for wearable devices. A roundtable will include top executives from several companies. InvenSense pioneered the industry’s first high-volume, commercial MEMS fabless business model. Benedetto Vigna, VP from STMicroelectronics, a large semiconductor company headquartered in Switzerland, will talk about his company’s involvement. Another company on the panel, Bosch Sensortec GmbH from Kusterdingen, Germany develops and markets a wide portfolio of MEMS sensors and solutions for smart phones, tablets, wearable devices. They offer 3-axis acceleration, gyroscope and geomagnetic sensors, integrated 6- and 9-axis, environmental sensors, and software.

QuickLogic helped make WiiU Game Pad possible.

If you’ve used a WiiU Game Pad, you’ve experienced the expertise of QuickLogic an inventor of customizable semiconductor solutions for mobile and portable electronics that should have a few words about gaming. Another panelist, PNI Sensor, develops geomagnetic sensors and sensor fusion technology for consumer products, the military, and scientific organizations. Stephen Whalley, Chief Strategy Officer, MEMS Industry Group will act as moderator.

In addition to this conference track, the Wearable Tech Awards will be given out the next day on Wednesday, January 7 on the Haymarket Stage of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Ten smart products from glasses to watches, health and fitness trackers, virtual reality, and new apps will take a walk in front of the judges.

Winners of the $1.3 million in cash awards from Intel’s Make It Wearable challenge that the company threw out a year ago will be announced. The Challenge combined competition and an entrepreneurial mentorship program. The products that were considered had to be a sensor or computing device that is attached, embedded or worn on the body. It had to be based on Intel technology. Steven Holmes, Vice President – Intel New Devices Group, will speak about Smart Device Innovation.

Instead of asking What’s in Your Wallet?, the question at CES will be What are You Wearing? and that’s not referring to Armani.

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Instead of implants under the skin that turned Steve Austin into the $6 million man, the Soft Exosuit fits outside the user’s body. It boosts a soldier’s ability to walk longer distances carrying heavy gear with less fatigue and improved resistance to injury.

Exosuits are a new class of applications for soft robotics. Soft, elastic sensors in an adjustable suit made of nylon, polyester, and spandex provide well-timed bursts of power intended to reduce the energy a soldier uses to walk. The suit mimics the action of the wearer’s leg muscles and tendons. Sensors embedded in the insoles of a boot send a signal to a computer processor in an actuator box on a backpack or waist belt. Cables transmit force to the joints. The system is continuously monitoring various data signals, including the suit tension, the position of the wearer, be they walking, stooping, or crawling. All the components, including a battery that gives out 50 watts of power for 4 hours, weigh about 13 pounds.

The US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering with a $2.9 million contract from their Warrior Web program.

The Warrior Web  says troops patrolling for long periods in rugged, hilly terrain usually are carrying 100 or more pounds of equipment. Musculoskeletal injuries can occur while bending, crawling or running, especially to ankles, knees and lumbar spine. Fatigue is common. The suit worn beneath the uniform promises to enhance strength and endurance of the wearer.

In the lab, scientists monitor the biomechanics and physiological implications from people interacting with these types of machines. This exosuit differs from others in that it is soft, not rigid as in the past.

Robot suit and its human wearer are monitored in the laboratory

Conor Walsh is Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Walsh is also a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Additionally, he founded the Harvard Biodesign Lab. He illustrates the operating principle of the robotic suit with this explanation: If you have a person in a swing, and “you start them swinging, then you just have to give a little tap at the right time, and the swing will keep moving.” Similarly, if a person begins walking, swinging their legs, the sensors give a boast of energy to the participating muscles.

Mapping coordinates for the Exosuit

Team Leader Walsh is working with Wyss Institute faculty Robert Wood, Yong-Lae Park, and George Whitesides; Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Harvard University graduate students and postdoctoral fellows; Terry Ellis and Ken Holt of Boston University’s College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences; and Sang-bae Kim of MIT. New Balance known best for their Made in America athletic shoes provides expertise in textile and apparel innovation.
The military isn’t the only segment of the population that may profit from the wearable robotic suit. Alternative versions of the suit could eventually assist those with limited mobility, such as individuals who have suffered a stroke or have cerebral palsy.

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Communication between cores on a computer chip becomes more and more difficult as the number of cores or processing units increases. Maintaining cache coherence, ensuring cores locally stored copies of globally accessible data is up to date is a problem that one set of researchers claims to have solved.

Dr. Li-Shiuan Peh, graduate of National University of Singapore and Stanford University is a research professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A group led by Li-Shiuan Peh, MIT Singapore Research Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, brought a 36-core network-on-a-chip to the International Symposium on Computer Architecture. Her team’s experimental design uses an Internet like communication network to manage local memory stores. Each core has an associated router where data travels between cores in packets of a fixed size.

Busses function successfully in most complex System on Chip (SoC) Silicon designs. However, cores connected by a bus stumble when the number of cores increases because the cores which do not have access to the bus at any given time sit idle. Bhavya Daya, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and first author of the paper, says “Snoopy [a cache coherence protocol] intrinsically relies on ordered interconnects which do not scale well.”

Still, this design works nicely managing data. Each core has its own cache which it sends back to memory. When a core needs some particular data, it sends a request to all the other cores, and the one with the specific data ships it back to the requesting core. With the network-on-a-chip design, however, the inherent ordering that the snoopy protocol uses is impaired.

To overcome this failure, Peh’s group equipped their chips with a second network, which shadows the first.  The snoopy protocol still works because a hierarchical ordering simulates the chronological ordering of requests sent over a bus.

Bhavya Daya graduated Summa cum Laude from University of Florida, Gainesville and is a PhD candidate at MIT.

Daya wants to prove the accuracy of the group’s theoretical projections. She plans to load the chips with a version of the Linux operating system, modified to run on 36 cores, and evaluate the performance of real applications. Thereafter, she will release blueprints for the chip, written in the hardware description language Verilog, as open-source code encouraging others to test and increase its viability.

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