95K likes, — zuck on September 30, 2025: “Huge milestone for AI and wearables. Meta Ray-Ban Display available today.”
Category: wearables
We’re Getting a Clearer Look at the Future of Wearables
In the tech industry’s first telling, the post-smartphone world is a simple question of what and when: glasses? Watches? Pins? Armbands? Implants? It’s portrayed as a simple matter of progress — in consumer technology, things must be replaced by newer and better things — but also as a reaction to the burdens and distractions of the previous great gadget, from which new gadgets will set us free.
A survey of the post-phone landscape as it exists, though, reveals a complication in this consumerist liberation story. Someday, a new gadget may usher us into the post-smartphone world; in the meantime, the industry will have us trying everything else at once: on our faces, in our ears, around our necks, and on our appendages. Our phones — and the always-on, data-and-attention-hungry logic they represent — aren’t being replaced. They’re being extended.
Smart device uses AI and bioelectronics to speed up wound healing process
As a wound heals, it goes through several stages: clotting to stop bleeding, immune system response, scabbing, and scarring. A wearable device called “a-Heal,” designed by engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to optimize each stage of the process. The system uses a tiny camera and AI to detect the stage of healing and deliver a treatment in the form of medication or an electric field. The system responds to the unique healing process of the patient, offering personalized treatment.
The portable, wireless device could make wound therapy more accessible to patients in remote areas or with limited mobility. Initial preclinical results, published in the journal npj Biomedical Innovations, show the device successfully speeds up the healing process.
‘Drop-printing’ shows potential for constructing bioelectronic interfaces that conform to complex surfaces
With the rapid development of wearable electronics, neurorehabilitation, and brain-machine interfaces in recent years, there has been an urgent need for methods to conformally wrap thin-film electronic devices onto biological tissues to enable precise acquisition and regulation of physiological signals.
Conventional methods typically rely on external pressure to force devices onto conformal contact. However, when applied to uneven three-dimensional surfaces such as skin, brain, or nerves, they generate significant internal stress which can easily damage fragile metal circuits and inorganic chips. This is an obstacle to the advancement of flexible electronics.
In a study published in Science, Prof. Song Yanlin’s team from the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Nanyang Technological University, and Tianjin University, propose a new film transfer strategy named as drop-printing, which has potential applications in bioelectronics, flexible displays, and micro-/nano-manufacturing.
Cotton-based methanol fuel cells could power future flexible electronics
Cotton-based fiber fuel cells can now convert methanol into electricity while sustaining peak power density through 2,000 continuous flex cycles. This breakthrough paves the way for safe, high-performance power sources for flexible electronics and wearable devices.
Researchers at Soochow University developed fiber-shaped direct methanol fuel cells (FDMFCs) using gel-encapsulated woven yarns. These “Yarn@gels” employ an adaptive internal pressure strategy, where the natural swelling of cotton fibers within the gel matrix generates pressure to keep the cell components tightly bound, removing the need for bulky, rigid parts. The result is a fuel cell that is flexible, cuttable, water-resistant, and quick to refuel in just one minute.
The findings of this study are published in Nature Materials.
Project Overview ‹ AlterEgo
AlterEgo is a non-invasive, wearable, peripheral neural interface that allows humans to converse in natural language with machines, artificial intelligence assistants, services, and other people without any voice—without opening their mouth, and without externally observable movements—simply by articulating words internally. The feedback to the user is given through audio, via bone conduction, without disrupting the user’s usual auditory perception, and making the interface closed-loop. This enables a human-computer interaction that is subjectively experienced as completely internal to the human user—like speaking to one’s self.
A primary focus of this project is to help support communication for people with speech disorders including conditions like ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and MS (multiple sclerosis). Beyond that, the system has the potential to seamlessly integrate humans and computers—such that computing, the Internet, and AI would weave into our daily life as a “second self” and augment our cognition and abilities.
The wearable system captures peripheral neural signals when internal speech articulators are volitionally and neurologically activated, during a user’s internal articulation of words. This enables a user to transmit and receive streams of information to and from a computing device or any other person without any observable action, in discretion, without unplugging the user from her environment, without invading the user’s privacy.
Soft magnetoelastic sensor measures fatigue from eyeball movements in real-time
Over the past few decades, electronics engineers have developed increasingly sophisticated sensors that can reliably measure a wide range of physiological signals, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate and oxygen saturation. These sensors were used to create both biomedical and consumer-facing wearable devices, advancing research and the real-time monitoring of health-related metrics, such as sleep quality and physiological stress.
Fatigue, a mental state marked by a decline in performance due to stress, lack of sleep, excessive activity or other factors, has proved to be more difficult to reliably quantify. Most existing methods for measuring fatigue rely on surveys that ask people to report how tired they feel, a method to record the brain’s electrical activity known as electroencephalography (EEG) or camera-based systems.
Most of these approaches are unreliable or only applicable in laboratory settings, as they rely on subjective evaluations, bulky equipment or controlled environments. These limitations prevent their large-scale deployment in everyday settings.
Atom-thin crystals provide new way to power the future of computer memory
Picture the smartphone in your pocket, the data centers powering artificial intelligence, or the wearable health monitors that track your heartbeat. All of them rely on energy-hungry memory chips to store and process information. As demand for computing resources continues to soar, so does the need for memory devices that are smaller, faster, and far more efficient.
A new study by Auburn physicists has taken an important step toward meeting this challenge.
The study, “Electrode-Assisted Switching in Memristors Based on Single-Crystal Transition Metal Dichalcogenides,” published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, shows how memristors—ultra-thin memory devices that “remember” past electrical signals —switch their state with the help of electrodes and subtle atomic changes inside the material.
Don’t sweat it: New device detects sweat biomarker at minimal perspiration rate
A team at Penn State has developed a novel wearable sensor capable of continuously monitoring low rates of perspiration for the presence of a lactate — a molecule the body uses to break down sugars for energy. This biomarker can indicate oxygen starvation in the body’s tissues, which is a key performance indicator for athletes as well as a potential sign of serious conditions such as sepsis or organ failure.
Scientists unveil a rubber band that generates electricity from body heat
A team led by scientists from Peking University has developed a rubber-like material that converts body heat into electricity. This advance could allow the next generation of wearable electronics to generate their own power continuously without the need for bulky batteries or constant recharging.
“Our thermoelectric elastomers combine skin-like elasticity with high energy conversion efficiency, paving the way for next-generation self-powered wearables,” the team said.