Clothing that Makes you Stronger

 Strength increasing , ergonomic enhancing, safety.  Examined aspects of this for supply chain use. 

German Bionic debuts its lightest powered exosuit to date at CES 2023

The company is also unveiling an ergonomics-monitoring safety vest.

Two models wearing the exosuit and vest standing against a cgi background with a bunch of graphs and stuff? I dunno. Either way, hope your day's going well. ... 

In Engadget  from German Bionic  By Andrew Tarantola|@terrortola|January 2, 2023

German Bionic, the robotic exoskeleton startup behind the Cray X, will be showing off two new posture-protecting products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada this week. The Apogee is the company's latest and lightest powered exosuit built for commercial and industrial use while the Smart SafetyVest will "bring ergonomic monitoring and protection to every worker," per a Monday release.

German Bionic Apogee and/or SafetyVest. The brace one has a woman wearing it while picking a large box out of a wire bin, the vest one is just a guy wearing it and looking directly into camera and there are a bunch more of the cgi line graphs and bar charts and stuff. I don't get this aesthetic at all. The equipment's cool though.

German Bionic

The Apogee builds from the lessons learned in developing the Cray X, resulting in German Bionic's lightest exosuit to date. Despite the litheness, it can offset up to 66 pounds of load to the user's lower back per lifting motion and offers active walking assistance to reduce fatigue. The SafetyVest, on the other hand, doesn't actively help the user pick up heavy stuff but it does monitor their movements and body positioning as they work and offers "data-based, personalized ergonomic insights, as well as assessments and recommended actions."

Both the Apogee and SafetyVest rely on the German Bionic IO architecture to collect, monitor, analyze and report the user's ergonomic data back to them. This is done typically either through the onboard display or via audible alerts when the user is actively making unsafe movements.   ... ' 

Example of Key Health IOT

Have become educated in advanced BP measurement lately which led me to note this IOT example. And the need for it.    Note this is something in progress, as yet not available.

eBP: An Ear-Worn Device for Frequent and Comfortable Blood Pressure Monitoring

By Nam Bui, Nhat Pham, Jessica Jacqueline Barnitz, Zhanan Zou, Phuc Nguyen, Hoang Truong, Taeho Kim, Nicholas Farrow, Anh Nguyen, Jianliang Xiao, Robin Deterding, Thang Dinh, Tam Vu

Communications of the ACM, August 2021, Vol. 64 No. 8, Pages 118-125  10.1145/3470446

Frequent blood pressure monitoring is the key to diagnosis and treatments of many severe diseases. However, the conventional ambulatory methods require patients to carry a blood pressure (BP) monitoring device for 24 h and conduct the measurement every 10–15 min. Despite their extensive usage, wearing the wrist/arm-based BP monitoring device for a long time has a significant impact on users' daily activities. To address the problem, we developed eBP to measure blood pressure (BP) from inside user's ear aiming to minimize the measurement's impact on users' normal activities although maximizing its comfort level.

The key novelty of eBP includes (1) a light-based inflatable pulse sensor which goes inside the ear, (2) a digital air pump with a fine controller, and (3) BP estimation algorithms that eliminate the need of blocking the blood flow inside the ear.

Through the comparative study of 35 subjects, eBP can achieve the average error of 1.8 mmHg for systolic (high-pressure value) and -3.1 mmHg for diastolic (low-pressure value) with the standard deviation error of 7.2 mmHg and 7.9 mmHg, respectively. These results satisfy the FDA's AAMI standard, which requires a mean error of less than 5 mmHg and a standard deviation of less than 8 mmHg.

Back to Top

1. Introduction

BP provides doctors with insight to initiate their diagnosis. For example, chronic kidney disease, sleep apnea, and adrenal and thyroid disorders can all cause high BP, whereas low BP indicates the possibility of heart or endocrine problems, dehydration, severe infection, or even blood loss. Additionally, uncontrolled elevated BP is a major symptom of many life-threatening diseases, such as hypertension, heart failure or stroke.4 Commonly, the reliable approach to measure BP was done by a health care practitioner using inflatable wrist cuff with a pressure gauge. Since the invention of digital BP devices, nonmedical trained users can self-measure their BP at home, as an acoustic sensor can replace the stethoscope, and a pressure sensor with a DC pump can substitute the pressure gauge and hand pump. However, these devices often cause discomfort and inconvenience for those who need frequent BP monitoring, such as hemodialysis (kidney failure) patients,18 individuals with undiagnosed white coat hypertension or undiagnosed masked hypertension. There is also an increased use of frequent BP monitoring for postoperative organ transplant recipients. In such cases, BP is measured every 30 min for 24 h,9 although each hemodialysis session takes around 4 h. Therefore, there is a significant need for an unobtrusive and comfortable BP monitoring approach. In the case of prolonged dialysis, patients hardly rest because the BP cuff constantly squeezes their arm and often hinders the wearer's mobility. Therefore, by moving the location of measuring BP to inside the ear, our device has a minimal impact in affecting the users' mobility and comfort.

In this paper, we aim to develop a novel wearable system to capture BP inside the ear called eBP, as illustrated in Figure 1. eBP resolves the aforementioned issues with its discreet design, quiet components, and convenient location.  .....'

Inobtrusive Wearables Monitoring Health

Interesting out of Purdue, where we connected in the retail modeling world.  Here it seems novel methods of self powering.    We called it 'smart clothing'.   Got a call from marketing execs about washing such clothing.  An internet of Togs? 

Forget Wearables: Future Washable Smart Clothes Powered by Wi-Fi Will Monitor Your Health  By Purdue University Research Foundation News

Purdue University engineers have developed a technique to turn apparel into washable smart clothes that operate without batteries, by drawing power wirelessly.

Purdue's Ramses Martinez said the method involves spray-coating the clothes with hydrophobic molecules to repel water, oil, and mud, while electronic components are sewn onto their surfaces.

The circuitry captures ambient Wi-Fi or radio waves, and converts them to electricity to power the clothes.

Said Martinez, "I envision smart clothes will be able to transmit information about the posture and motion of the wearer to mobile apps, allowing machines to understand human intent without the need of other interfaces, expanding the way we communicate, interact with devices, and play video games."

From Purdue University Research Foundation News

Coronavirus Apps Show Promise but Prove a Tough Sell

 Good to see an experiment of this type, at very least to see how people react to permitting monitoring , and what it takes for them to trust it and its use.

Coronavirus Apps Show Promise but Prove a Tough Sell

The New York Times, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

Despite pilot studies demonstrating that smartphone applications can slow Covid-19 transmission, buy-in from people and states is lacking. Apple and Google's exposure-notification apps respect privacy by not tracking user locations, using Bluetooth to detect which phones have been within several feet of one another for more than a few minutes. When a user receives a positive test result, the local health system supplies code via email, text message, or phone call to enter into the app, alerting anyone who was in proximity while the person was contagious. A pilot program at the University of Arizona offered what may be the first example of an app slowing transmission; researchers estimated this fall the app sent alerts for up to 12% of transmissions. Yet such apps are only available in about a third of U.S. states, hampered by privacy issues, little awareness or interest, poor access to quick testing, and a hodgepodge of government health authorities.  ... "

Phones Create Earthquake Monitor

Saw similar applications suggested for some time.  I am still a member of a CA based system that in part combines sensors and crowd sourcing monitors.  I get alerts weekly.  And will be alerted if people need to take quick action.  Now Google is seriously in the loop.

Google turns Android phones into an earthquake detection network
Your phones are essentially mini seismometers.
By Cherlynn Low, @cherlynnlow  in Engadget

In a natural disaster like an earthquake, even a few seconds’ heads up could save lives. You could use that time to get you and your loved ones somewhere safe and prevent fatalities and injuries. Google is rolling out a feature today that not only gives you an early warning about potential earthquakes happening, but also turns your phone into a mini seismometer and makes it part of a network of shockwave-detecting Android devices.

“The public infrastructure to detect and alert everyone about an earthquake is costly to deploy,” Google’s principal software engineer of Android Marc Stogaitis said in a blog post today. Not everyone is signed up to receive text alerts, for example, so if the early warning system is built into the OS, these messages can reach more people. Google first collaborated with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services to send these alerts to Android devices in California via the USGS’ ShakeAlert system. This uses information gathered from more than 700 seismometers across the state to figure out when an earthquake is taking place.... " 

Monitoring Virus Patients by Phone

With an expectation of a certain degree of violation of privacy and the need for regulating that.

Israel Takes Step Toward Monitoring Phones of Virus Patients
Associated Press
By Josef Federman
March 15, 2020

Israel's government has authorized its Shin Bet security agency to use its phone-surveillance system on coronavirus patients in an effort to control the epidemic, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledging that such measures would "entail a certain degree of violation of privacy." Shin Bet would employ mobile-phone tracking technology to more precisely model a patient's movements prior to diagnosis, and identify people who might have been exposed to the virus. In response to privacy concerns, Netanyahu reduced the scope of information to be collected and restricted how many people can view the data, to shield against misuse. Yuval Elovici at Ben-Gurion University's cybersecurity research center suggested privacy issues can be minimized by culling data anonymously. ... " 

Causal Monitoring for Distributed Systems: IOT Solutions

Spent some time looking at monitoring and troubleshooting systems, with the obvious need to infer causation.   Here an intro to 'Pivot Tracing', a means of causal monitoring I had not heard of.    Would seem to be very useful for interconnected IOT.   Technical.

Pivot Tracing: Dynamic Causal Monitoring for Distributed Systems
By Jonathan Mace, Ryan Roelke, Rodrigo Fonseca
Communications of the ACM, March 2020, Vol. 63 No. 3, Pages 94-102
10.1145/3378933

Monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems are notoriously difficult; potential problems are complex, varied, and unpredictable. The monitoring and diagnosis tools commonly used today—logs, counters, and metrics—have two important limitations: what gets recorded is defined a priori, and the information is recorded in a component- or machine-centric way, making it extremely hard to correlate events that cross these boundaries. This paper presents Pivot Tracing, a monitoring framework for distributed systems that addresses both limitations by combining dynamic instrumentation with a novel relational operator: the happened-before join. Pivot Tracing gives users, at runtime, the ability to define arbitrary metrics at one point of the system, while being able to select, filter, and group by events meaningful at other parts of the system, even when crossing component or machine boundaries. Pivot Tracing does not correlate cross-component events using expensive global aggregations, nor does it perform offline analysis. Instead, Pivot Tracing directly correlates events as they happen by piggybacking metadata alongside requests as they execute. This gives Pivot Tracing low runtime overhead—less than 1% for many cross-component monitoring queries.  ... "

Infrastructure Monitoring

Hands free,  clear place for monitoring applications in the smart city.

Swarms of drones will soon keep tabs on our aging city infrastructure  By Luke Dorme in Digitaltrends

When it comes to the future commercial applications of drones, it seems that inspecting the world’s aging infrastructure may be one task where UAVs can corner the market. The latest demonstration of this? A project from researchers from Sweden’s Lulea University of Technology who have been testing how teams of autonomous drones can be used to keep tabs on wind turbines: potentially alerting authorities of any impending problems. .. "

Open source Monitoring with Prometheus

Open source monitoring,  good detail at the link.   The word monitoring by itself always attracts me, it means we can understand things in operation, and better understand how to  improve that.  First I had heard of this example.

5 examples of Prometheus monitoring success

Organizations are benefiting from the open source monitoring toolkit's customization, simplicity, and cost savings.

Prometheus is an open source monitoring and alerting toolkit for containers and microservices. The project is a hit with lots of different organizations regardless of their size or industrial sector. The toolkit is highly customizable and designed to deliver rich metrics without creating a drag on system performance. Based on the organizations that have adopted it, Prometheus has become the mainstream, open source monitoring tool of choice for those that lean heavily on containers and microservices.

Conceived at SoundCloud in 2012, Prometheus became part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2016 and in August 2018, CNCF announced Prometheus was the second "graduated" project in the organization's history.

Prometheus provides a key component for a modern DevOps workflow: keeping watch over cloud-native applications and infrastructure, including another popular CNCF project, Kubernetes. ...."