Tech for Good

2021-12-21 12:25:00 AI to help fight strokes

Here is another perfect example of using AI for good. Named by Forbes as one of the next billion-dollar startups, Viz.ai from San Francisco delivers a solution to improve stroke care.

Statistics show that each year, about 795,000 people in the United States only have strokes, and of these incidents, 137,000 people die. While practicing as a neurosurgeon in the U.K., Chris Mansi, CEO of Viz.ai, saw firsthand how surgery could go well, yet the patient would die because too much time had passed before getting to the operating room. The company's software uses AI to cross-reference patient's brain CT (computer tomography) images with its database of scans to find early signs of large vessel occlusion strokes.

The algorithm reads the scan in 60 seconds, and instead of taking four or five hours and 12 or 13 phone calls, 60 seconds later, an alert goes off on the surgeon's phone. He can see all the images on his smartphone, initiate transport services, and activate the stroke team with a push of a button in the app.

Nearly 900 hospitals have already signed up, and Viz.ai became the rare AI technology approved by FDA. The company is now expanding from strokes to the treatment of other common diseases.

2-minute explanatory video for those interested

#AI #medtech #startups Open / Comment

2021-12-20 13:56:01 An EV company to watch

With almost all big automakers making claims to switch to electric cars in the next decade or two, there is one EV startup standing out from the crowd. Arrival is a London-based company producing electric delivery vans and buses. And what makes it special is the unique approach to EVs from production through delivery.

A traditional car factory is a gigantic centralized facility that employs thousands of people, requires over $1 billion to build, and needs to get to very high production levels to make any margin.

Arrival challenges the assembly line approach pioneered by Henry Ford with its highly-automated micro-factories employing a few hundred workers. Micro-factory does not require any special foundations and may occupy an existing industrial facility such as a warehouse. It consists of several assembly cells with 3-4 off-the-shelf multitasking robots and can produce tens of thousands of vehicles a year.

The advantage, according to Arrival, is that its micro-factories will cost about $50 million (instead of $1 billion) and will allow building vehicles profitably at any volume. This method should also yield vans that cost a lot less than other electric models and even today’s standard, diesel-powered vehicles.

The company is also replacing most steel parts used in vehicles with components made from advanced composites, a mix of polypropylene and fiberglass. That allows eliminating from the car plant the paint shop, the giant stamp presses, and the robots that weld metal parts. Besides, that makes the repair and maintenance work for vans easier - Arrival's composite panels can easily be removed and replaced without painting.

Arrival has already won over UPS, which has a less than 1 percent stake in the company and plans to buy 10,000 Arrival vans over the next several years.

2-minute Arrival's video
Article on NY Times

#EV #startups Open / Comment

2021-12-19 16:05:34 Here is the Sunday's #weeksummary:

Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 - a supersonic commercial airliner trying to reach audacious goals
The invisible smart lock - a techy home lock with an invisible design
Drone delivery is inevitable - why autonomous drones will soon be the dominant way to deliver small payloads

As usual, I would appreciate your thoughts on the channel content.

Be safe and have a great start of the next week!

Your Tech for Good Open / Comment

2021-12-17 12:53:13 Drone delivery is inevitable

Yesterday, I read a good article by Byrne Hobart on his "The Diff" blog. Byrne reasons autonomous drones will soon be the dominant way to deliver small payloads—lunch, a snack, coffee, medication, household products.

He illustrates the inefficiency of current delivery by car with an example of delivering a 1-pound (0.5 kg) burrito. A person devotes 100% of his time to driving a 2800-lb (1300 kg) car, making a series of turns, and moving at a variable speed because of stop signs, stoplights, and other obstacles.

Of the ~2lbs (1 kg) of CO2 emitted in a three-mile drive, 99.6% are spent on moving a person and a vehicle, while the other 0.4% are devoted to moving the food. As for the cost of that transaction, a big chunk is paying a person to maneuver a large vehicle around other rather large vehicles, all to deliver something comparatively tiny.

So any small payload that needs timely delivery can be sent more efficiently by a drone than by a car.

Alphabet's Wing startup is an excellent example of how autonomous drones can work as a product. Wing had done 100,000 deliveries since launch as of late August in their current markets of Australia, the US, and Finland. An Irish startup Manna, which uses human-operated drones, says its delivery costs are 90% lower than drivers.

So once drones have reasonable incremental margins, a decent safety record, and consumer adoption, the main problem to solve would be capital to build drone fleets. And capital has never been more abundant.

Video about Wing
Article about Manna
Byrne's full blog post

#drones #startups #delivery Open / Comment

2021-12-16 07:42:38 The invisible smart lock

Let us get to the home security products. Founded by ex-Apple employees, Level Home startup has developed a Level Bolt, the smart home lock with an invisible design without monstrous keypads or giant chrome handles.

Level Bolt's hardware completely hides inside the lock hole, meaning you can replace the existing hardware, and your door will look the same when you finish. The lock battery is ingeniously hidden inside the bolt - you simply unscrew the end of the deadbolt to replace it. The company says a single 3-volt CR2 cell should last about a year.

As a Bluetooth lock, the primary interaction method is via the Level app on your phone. The app design is minimalist. Just tap and hold on to the action panel to open or close the lock. Color coding here tells you the lock status: if the background is white, the lock is open. If black, it is closed. An activity log tells you who came and went and how they opened or closed the lock.

You can share access with others via the app. A geofencing auto-unlock system is also available. Having a phone in your pocket opens the door when you approach it. You can also turn on the automatic locking option.

The lock integrates with existing voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, and you can unlock the door with a voice command.

Level Bolt 1-minute video
Company's website

#securitytech #devices #startups Open / Comment

2021-12-13 15:14:19 Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100

That is how the long-term goal of the Denver-based Boom Supersonic sounds. The startup is developing the Overture, the supersonic commercial airliner able to reach Mach-2.2 speeds (around 2700 km/h) - more than twice as fast as today's subsonic commercial jets.

Designed to seat between 65 and 88 people, Overture will focus on over 500 primarily transoceanic routes that will benefit from such speed: from New York to London in 3:30 hours instead of 6:30 hours; from Singapore to Dubai in 4 hours instead of 7 hours.

We can think that the supersonic dream has died with Concorde. The British-French airliner flew from 1969 to 2003, was ludicrously expensive and an environmental disaster. However, the Boom team thinks differently. At the first stage, the company will set fares at a price point similar to business class. That contrasts Concorde, which by the '90s was charging around $20,000 for a round trip in today's money.

As for the environmental issues, Overture will enable net-zero-carbon flight by flying on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). SAF is produced using carbon extracted from the atmosphere using renewable energy.

While experts may consider the "Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100" as an audacious goal that can take another 20 years to become a reality, Boom Supersonic is already making some progress. They have built the 1:3 scale XB1 prototype aircraft and will fly it around the end of this year.

Interest in Boom's project has been high. The team says it currently has $6 billion in pre-orders of the Overture aircraft.

1-minute video of the Overture
Article on CNN Travel

#startups #aviation #netzero Open / Comment

2021-12-12 15:25:35 As usual, here is Sunday and here is the #weeksummary:

Indian Plastic Roads - India building roads using recycled plastic waste
Speak to my bones - a communication device using bone-conduction for the toughest environments
See each other for the first time - a surgery miracle backed by the latest tech to separate conjoined twins for the first time in history
A Digital Nose - MIT researchers developing a device to sniff out specific diseases and to eventually be built into every smartphone

I'd like to welcome everyone who joined the channel this week. In case you have any questions or suggestions, you may join our chat @tfg_safechat

See you all around next week

Your Tech for Good Open / Comment

2021-12-10 11:55:01 ​A Digital Nose

Diseases often change human body odor. When a virus attacks a healthy cell, it produces a toxic byproduct. The body emits this byproduct via breath, sweat, or urine. And MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) researchers are developing a digital nose that could sniff each specific disease.

The person’s sense of smell is weak and subjective, so we can’t rely on a human nose to diagnose a patient. A dog’s nose is 100,000 times better than ours. ”Dogs are the most accurate disease detectors for anything that we’ve ever tried,” said Andreas Mershin, a scientist at MIT.

However, training dogs to sniff out each specific disease is expensive and time-consuming. Plus, it’s not super convenient to bring a dog into every doctor’s office or airport.

So Mershin and his team create a digital dog nose to build into every smartphone. Earlier this year, Mershin and his team announced a Nano-Nose — a robotic nose powered by AI — that could identify cases of prostate cancer from urine samples with 70% accuracy. The study claims that the robotic nose performed just as well as trained dogs in detecting the disease.

For a real-world application, the team has to make the system work outside the lab - where multiple smells are present.

Smartphones that smell are nearing reality, Mershin told Vox.
“I think we’re maybe five years away, maybe a little bit less,” he says, “to get it from where it is now to fully inside of a phone. And I’m talking about deploying it into a hundred million phones.”

Article on Big Think

#medtech #robotics #AI Open / Comment

2021-12-09 07:25:58 See each other for the first time

After months of intense planning and practice, surgeons at UC Davis Children’s Hospital, for the first time in history, successfully separated nine-month-old conjoined twins Abigail and Micaela Bachinskiy in a marathon surgery this past October. The two girls were born fused at the head; that condition occurs approximately once in 2.5 million births.

Team members included more than 30 surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other surgical staff. And, of course, that surgical miracle would not be possible without the help of the latest tech.

The surgeons carefully tracked the children's growth through MRIs and CT scans. Then the doctors uploaded and viewed 3D reconstructions of these MRI and CT scans on the Magic Leap 1 headset. These mixed reality goggles offered an augmented view of the complex network of blood vessels to be detangled and separated. So surgeons were able to explore inside the girls' heads.

For precision planning and practice, the surgeons used 3D printing. That generated multiple physical models of the twins’ fused skulls.

During the operation itself, team members were divided by color. Leaders had black caps. Team Purple took care of Micaela, while Team Orange cared for Abigail; they had surgical caps in either purple or orange for easy visibility in the operating room. Surgical residents wore grey caps and could assist with either girl. Purple and orange masking tapes were used to label equipment for the respective teams in the operating room.

After a 24-hour choreographed surgical ballet, the previously joined twins were resting comfortably — and separately — in their room in the UC Davis Hospital. Abigail and Micaela were able to face and see each other for the first time.

4-minute video featuring Magic Leap googles and 3D-printing
Article on UC Davis Health

#medtech #VR #3Dprint Open / Comment

2021-12-07 16:20:51 ​Speak to my bones

Voice is the most fundamental and natural means for communication. However, we are still operating with a 150-year-old paradigm to communicate at distance. Some device in your hand or stuck to the side of your face, something stuck in or over your ears, and a microphone as close to your mouth as possible.

Mobilus Labs startup from London is changing this with their device called mobiWAN. That is a Bluetooth two-way bone-conduction voice communications wearable for workers in the loudest environments, such as construction and industrial sites.

The device attached to the back of the protective helmet transfers soundwaves through the bones in your head directly to the inner ear. You can hear the bone conduction audio even when wearing full hearing protection equipment.

The same bone conduction turns the mobiWAN into a microphone. It detects the vibration in the wearer's jaw and head and transmits it back as standard voice communication. That allows to isolate the voice and eliminate the noise of their environment.

With nearly 50% of all rework, and numerous site injuries caused by miscommunication, Mobilus technology creates a safer, more efficient, and productive site.

Mobilus Labs website where you can hear the two recordings. They are taken in a high noise environment, one on mobiWAN and one on a standard microphone.

#wearables #startups #voice Open / Comment