Poster Board Presentations!

Today was the last day for the Poster Board presentations. Overall I think they went well and that it was a really cool idea to do something like this. The set up was great and the fact that the audience would be tweeting about our boards was a great idea too.

I presented my poster on the Bionic hand as blogged about earlier, I did manage to get a few people interested and talked about it with them, explaining what the new technology was all about, however I didn't get as many tweets as I would have liked!

Today was the day I was the audience, and got to see alot of really cool ideas that people presented, I especially like skylar's, it was on the Bionic Contact Lense, a really neat idea that was somewhat closely related to mine, so it did spark my interests to say the least.

The set up was really cool too, we have rows of presenters and we would walk through and stop to ask about any board that caught our attention, behind the boards was a large wall that showed all the recent tweets about the posters and to the side were computers for those who didn't have a mobile device from which they could send their tweets.

Overall it was a great experience and I learned a lot from everyones boards and this class too, a lot of the things discussed in class could be seen through the posters and the way people presented too.

To check out the tweets, please go to twitter and search for com435.

Barnes & Noble Nook e-Book reader

Barnes & Nobles is coming out with a device called the nook. It is basically a book that can be read on a screen, more of an electronic book to say the least. It is powered but Android 1.5 and will be featuring the familiar e-Ink text display. It will benefit from a 3.5 inch color touch screen so that you can browse a library and order books too. It is wireless and has access to over a million eBooks, magazines, newspapers and so on.

Check out the video below for a little bit more info!

GE Vscan portable ultrasound scanner unveiled

Wow! We've come along way.

Can you believe, that the guys at General Electrics have come out with a portable ultrasound scanner!?

It unveiled its pocket-sized ultrasound scanned in San Francisco at a Web 2.0 Summit.
It allows physicians to scan any part of the body without the hassel of a huge computer and system attached to it. A microphone wand attached to the main body of the device will send and recieve sound wave data when it is in contact with the body. This is then obviously translate into a picture onto the screen. It can do all the things a normal ultrasound scanner can do, but just in a small more compact size.

Not only will it empower doctors to make quicker decisions on the spot with faster diagnosis', the size of the device will also be extremely useful to medical professional in remote areas.

Bionic Hand

Well basically today we had our poster board presentations on an emerging technologies. I chose to do the Bionic Hand and thought I would let you guys know, what it's all about. I basically chose this because we talked about cyborgs in class and also had to write a paper on it, it was pretty interesting. Below you can watch a video of what our paper was based on and also the inspiration for my poster board.

Basically the Bionic hand is created by Touch Bionics, the leaders in advanced upper-limb prosthetics.

The hand looks like a prosthetic, however the only difference is, it moves around, electrically. The hand has myoelectric controls that use electrical signals generated by the muscles in the remaning part of the patient's limb to move the hand around.

The signals are picked up by electrodes placed on the surface of the skin, traditionally on the forearm and at the bottom too.

It's a really cool technology, that fortunately allows people who are missing the limb to resume a normal life style. Around 400 patients worldwide current use it and I believe it really improves the well-being as whole for the individual.

If you want to know more, check out: http://www.touchbionics.com/i-LIMB