smart health connected objects printed in 3D and walking without electricity

Researchers from the University of Washington have unveiled smart health connected objects printed in 3D and operating without electricity!

These 3D printed smart health connected objects can communicate with Wi-Fi devices such as smartphones or computers without needing to be powered by batteries or a wall outlet.

Among the 3D printed smart health connected objects that have been presented, we have for example a sensor that alerts you when you have almost no more detergent and that it is necessary to order it.

At the heart of the development are wave reflection techniques known as backscattering, where ambient radio signals are reflected by a Wi-Fi router via a printed antenna using a mixture of plastic and copper and to a receiver without thread. Rather than using batteries to power the 3D printed object or sensor, the researchers used mechanical movement.

When the liquid flows, a wheel or button is pushed, the gears and springs activate or deactivate a conductive switch, changing the reflective state of the 3D printed antenna. Data can be hard-coded into an object using teeth on the gear; the presence or absence of a tooth determining how long a switch remains in contact with the antenna.

"When you put detergent in a Tide bottle, for example, the speed at which the gears rotate tells you how much soap is flowing," said lead author Shyam Gollakota. "The interaction between the 3D printed switch and the antenna transmits this data over wifi, then the receiver can track the amount of detergent you have left; and when it drops below a certain level, it can automatically send a message to your Amazon app. "

As I said, the team at the University of Washington's Networks & Mobile Systems laboratory has created a number of objects capable of detecting and transmitting information to other smart health connected devices, including a detergent flow meter, wind and water flowmeters, a balance and a tube holder.

Devices such as buttons and sliders have also been printed. They can be personalized to communicate with a particular smart health connected device in your health home automation system. So you can use them to control the volume of your music or order products from your favorite online shop.

Not content with creating objects without batteries and electronics that can communicate wirelessly with smart devices, the team also played with magnetism to encode information in 3D printed objects. Identification information similar to bar codes could be embedded in a printed object using plastic / iron filament and read using a smartphone.

A document detailing the research was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques in Asia last week. A ehealth describing the project can be seen below.

(Embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU6-o9SIkMQ (/ embed)

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