These inventions will change lives for the better if they are noticed.

How to read your own thoughts and get an answer to them? How to find out everything about the state of crops with the help of a small sticker? How to make sure that a smart pill does not get lost in the human body? How to make a corn table lamp with a 3D printer? Kommersant continues to talk about new and old inventions with great potential.

When words are unnecessary

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab have created headset AlterEgo, which seems to hear the thoughts of a person. In any case, this is the impression. A person puts on AlterEgo, mentally gives a command or asks a question and receives a response, or his command is executed on connected devices, including a smartphone. According to the creators, the headset, which is attached to the auricle and adjacent to the chin and lower jaw, reads the signals that the human brain sends to the mouth and jaw, and thus “hears” what the person mentally says.

The accuracy of mental speech recognition during the tests was 92%, according to MIT.

The user receives feedback from AlterEgo through the bone conduction earpiece, that is, not directly into the ear canal, which allows you to hear information from AlterEgo, even when talking to someone or listening to ambient sounds. You walk around the city, you see something interesting, you mentally ask AlterEgo about it and you get an answer without taking out your smartphone and without looking for the necessary information in it.

Stick on and find out

Scientists from the University of North Carolina have come up with a convenient and effective way to monitor the health of plants without doing any complicated analyzes and to detect diseases at an early stage. They created an electronic stickerwhich is enough to stick to a leaf of a plant to get information about the presence of any pathogens in this plant, about viral or fungal infections, and also to find out if it suffers from a lack of moisture or excess salt in the soil.

The sticker, which measures only 3 cm by 3 cm, contains nanowire electrodes and sensors that capture volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by plants.

In different situations – whether it be drought, disease or other stress – plants release different VOCs, and by capturing them, one can accurately determine the health of the plant. Scientists tested “smart” stickers on tomato bushes.

The plants were infected with three types of pathogens, the soil of some was excessively moist, while others were overdried or oversalted, they lacked lighting. And all these factors were determined by the sensors on the stickers. Moreover, scientists say, the presence of pathogens was established just four days after the infection of the plant. This is a very good indicator, since usually visible signs of the disease appear only on the 10-14th day. While the sticker transmits data over the wire attached to it. But in the near future, the authors of the development intend to release its wireless version, which should contribute to its wider use.

GPS navigator for smart tablets

Everyone knows about the existence of so-called smart pills – electronic devices that, when swallowed, move along the gastrointestinal tract, collecting information about its condition along the way. These devices use the real-time positioning system (RTLS), in which the tablet itself is a kind of radio beacon. The signals it gives allow you to determine its location in the human body. However, the accuracy of this system is not high, up to several centimeters, which, in the case of, for example, the small intestine, does not always make it possible to accurately determine its location.

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have succeeded in developing such a smart tablet, the location accuracy of which is less than 1 mm.

According to the creators iMAG (Ingestible Microdevices for Anatomic-mapping of Gastrointestinal-tract), it is the most accurate and easy-to-use device ever developed for this purpose. Unlike smart tablets that use the RTLS system, iMAG is guided by magnetic fields, which are created by flat inductors installed next to the lying patient. iMAG transmits location data via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

You can examine the patient not only in the supine position, but even on the move: then the coils fit into a backpack or a special vest. With the help of iMAG, for example, gastrointestinal motility can be easily and effectively checked, something that was previously performed with an X-ray with a contrast agent or an electrophysiological study. Now scientists are working to make iMAG even more accurate and less expensive. In addition, they want to make it so that iMAG can deliver the drug to a specific point in the gastrointestinal tract or perform other actions.

Charged and decontaminated

According to research, there can be 17,000 gene units on a mobile device at any one time, ten times more than the average found on a toilet seat. It is logical that such an important device for the life and work of a modern person as a mobile phone must be provided with good protection, at the same time protecting its owner from potential infection. And in order not to waste time separately on recharging the phone and then on disinfection, Lexon designers created device Oblio, which allows you to combine these two processes. Oblio looks stylish, resembling a small vase. But in this vase, you can fully charge your smartphone without contact in three hours, and disinfect it in just 20 minutes using the built-in ultraviolet emitter and ionizer.

The developers guarantee the destruction of 99.9% of bacteria from the surfaces of the gadget. In addition, Lexone says that studies have allegedly shown efficacy against viruses, including the influenza A virus.

Oblio has been named one of the best inventions of 2020 by TIME magazine. And in 2021, he won the Innovation Award in the Health and Wellness category at CES, one of the world’s largest consumer electronics shows in Las Vegas.

Corn lamps

It is known that anything can be printed on a 3D printer. Even a table lamp or lamp. But in a San Francisco company Gantri nevertheless, they found a way to make such table lamps that will not be similar in form or content to any others. In collaboration with designers from Ammunition, they have developed a range of sustainable lighting products. The aim of the developers was to literally shed light on the potential of 3D printing as a fast and relatively inexpensive way to produce environmentally friendly products, in this case lamps.

Polyaktide is used for printing lamps, the raw material for the production of which is corn, that is, an annually renewable resource.

Table lamps and lamps in a variety of often unusual shapes and sizes are printed and assembled at the Gantri factory and then hand-finished and painted. The whole process from sketching to getting the lamp ready for use takes about eight weeks.

The sound of printed text

For millions of people on the planet, reading books or any texts is not easy, and sometimes impossible. For example, for the visually impaired, blind or dyslexic. But modern technology and the use of AI are now able to solve this problem. One option is to use a portable reader devices OrCam Read, which turns any written text into audio. The device, which fits easily in the palm of your hand, recognizes text in any language, on any topic, printed or digital, or even legible handwritten text. It is enough to turn on OrCam Read, point its camera at the text, and in two seconds this text will sound. The device has two modes of operation: it reads the text as a whole page and reads it out or reads a specific word or combination of words. The text is voiced in a pleasant human voice. OrCam Read appeared on the market just before the COVID-19 pandemic, and there are a lot of grateful reviews on the Internet from users who, during long periods of self-isolation, could “read” using this device.

Alena Miklashevskaya