Whether you’re chatting it up with a far-away friend or, um, hanging out in a Google+ Hangout, we all know that webcams can supply tons of digital video fun. But did you know webcams can improve your health, too? Neither did we, at least not until we heard of a nifty project involving webcams, 60 office workers, and a research team from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Sit up and pay attention! The researchers first showed those 60 office workers an image of proper sitting posture, PC World reports . Some custom software used the webcam to snap periodic pictures of those workers in their chairs, then displayed the picture on screen side-by-side with the reference picture – you know, so the workers could see how they should be sitting. The researchers reported sustained posture improvement throughout the study, as opposed to the measured, yet brief improvement that occurs after a typical in-office posture training session. Guys are the most hard-headed (or dedicated) slouchers; women and old folks proved most responsive to the project. The team hopes that offices can use webcam posture programs to help reduce the rate of musculoskeletal disorders over the long term – which should help lower insurance rates. Win-win! Image credit: thebackuniversity.com
Posts Tagged ‘university’
Researchers Use Webcams To Rub Poor Posture In Slouching Office Workers’ Faces
August 5th, 2011 
admin 
Posted in Tech News 
Tags: ergonomics, health, negev, news, office-workers, over-the-long, research, study, university, webcam 
Comments OffResearchers Develop New Techniques to Make Multi-Core Processors More Awesome
May 28th, 2011 admin Think of all the things you could do with a 100-core processor, or even a 1,000-core processor. Climb the ranks of Maximum PC’s Folding@Home team! Encode videos like a boss! Run Crysis! Ah, if only it was as easy as piling on more cores for exponential performance gains. There’s more to it than that, and a couple of researchers from North Carolina University say they’ve developed a pair of techniques that will help maximize the performance of multi-core processors by allowing them to retrieve data more efficiently. As the researchers explain it, the new techniques allow multi-core chips to do a better job allocating bandwidth and “prefetching” data, according to a press release issued by NCSU. “The first technique relies on criteria we developed to determine how much bandwidth should be allotted to each core on a chip,” says Dr. Yan Solihin, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. “By better distributing the bandwidth to the appropriate cores, the criteria are able to maximize system performance. “The second technique relies on a set of criteria we developed for determining when prefetching will boost performance and should be utilized, as well as when prefetching would slow things down and should be avoided.” By using both techniques, the researchers claim they were able to boost multi-core chip performance by 40 percent compared to multi-core processors that don’t prefetch data, and 10 percent compared to multi-core chips that always prefetch data. For all the geeky details, you can read the 12-page paper here .
Posted in Tech News Tags: bandwidth, climb-the-ranks, easy-as-piling, first-technique, multi-core, news, north, north-carolina, performance, press-release, research, researchers, the-researchers, university Comments OffAndroid vulnerability reflects need for more timely updates
May 19th, 2011 admin Rice University professor Dan Wallach wrote a blog post in February that discussed the threat that network eavesdropping poses to Android users. Several applications, including the platform’s native Google Calendar software, don’t use SSL encryption to protect their network traffic. Wallach speculated that the calendar software could be susceptible to an impersonation attack. Researchers at the University of Ulm followed up on Wallach’s findings and devised a proof-of-concept attack to demonstrate the vulnerability. Several of Google’s applications use the ClientLogin authentication system but fail to use SSL to encrypt their communication with Google’s servers, making them susceptible to eavesdropping attacks. Read the comments on this post
Posted in Tech News Tags: calendar, client, communication, Gadgets, google-calendar, network, news, read-the-rest, university, wallach Comments OffNew In A Light – A Coating That Heals In Light
April 22nd, 2011 admin Wouldn’t it be great if you could take your car to the panel shop and have it repaired in minutes, before your eyes, without anyone even laying hands on it? Wouldn’t you love to have a tabletop that could handle a gouging from a wayward knife or ballpoint pen? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you only ever had to buy Tupperware once? There have been several developments in self-healing coatings recently, but the latest innovation from a collaboration between Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, Switzerland’s University of Fribourg, and the Army Research Laboratory in Maryland has to be one of the best yet. While most self-healing coatings require heat to heal, all this one requires is light , and it does it fast. The ‘ optically healable supramolecular polymers ‘ actually dis assemble when exposed to a high dose of ultraviolet light. The light causes the metallosupramolecular polymer’s molecules to become electrically excited, which generates heat, causing the non-covalently linked, low-molecular-mass polymers to become temporarily disengaged. Once disengaged from the scratched chaos, they link back into the original structure of their coordination complex. Or, as co-author Christoph Weder, from the University of Fribourg, puts it, “Ultraviolet light is absorbed by the sticky end groups of our new supramolecular polymers, converted into heat, and the supramolecular structures disassemble into the small building blocks from which they were made.” But what is the advantage of using light instead of heat to heal a material? Fellow researcher, Mark Burnworth, from Case Western Reserve, explains: “By using light, we have more control as it allows us to target only the defect and leave the rest of the material untouched.” Like this:
Posted in Tech News Tags: advantage, causing-the-non, christoph-weder, coordination, leave-the-rest, only-the-defect, optically-healable, research, scratched, supramolecular, university, western-reserve Comments OffBYU Students Develop An Affordable Eye-Tracking Tablet For Disabled People
April 16th, 2011 admin Students from the Brigham Young University (BYU) have come up with a really innovative gadget that can serve as a useful tool for the disabled that costs a whole lot less than the available commercial alternatives available in the market. Several engineering students from the university teamed up with EyeTech Digital Systems to create an inexpensive all-in-one eye tracking system. The premise behind the collaboration was to come up with a computer system that the user can control simply with movements from his or her eyes. If you’ve ever heard of the Tobii PCEye , then this is the type of device that these students were aiming for with their project. The PCEye does a really good job but it costs $6,900, which is a steal for what it can do but is still a pretty steel amount to fork out. The BYU students who took part in the project were Clint ollins, Nathan Christensen, Scott Rice, Vicky Lee, and Bryan Johnson, with Jedediah Nieveen as the captain and Greg Bishop as the team’s faculty coach. The project was actually a capstone project where students are partnered up with real clients to come up with solutions to real-world engineering problems. The final product from the collaboration was a device that resembled a thick tablet PC, which is equipped with a touch screen and runs on Windows 7, with the eye-tracking system already built into it. Most systems with similar capabilities are priced at a hefty $14,000 (or $6,900 like the Tobii PCEye mentioned above), but the students were able to build their device using cheaper, readily obtainable parts for $1,500. The main goal of the project was to develop a device that would be useful for disabled people. However, the applications of the device are not limited to that as it can also be used later on in different fields, such as in research, advertising, and even in gaming. Team leader Jedediah Nieveen says of the project: “A lot of times in school, you just work problems out of books. But this allowed us to take what we learned and apply it to something in real life, something that can help a lot of people, and that’s really helped me.” Indeed, an amazing feat. Source: Brigham Young University
Posted in Tech News Tags: applications, bishop, brigham-young, bryan-johnson, collaboration, device, digital, digital-systems, image-image-img, project, runs-on-windows, university, windows Comments OffPlan It – Chart The World With StatPlanet
April 15th, 2011 admin There’s some great stuff going on over at Challenge.gov and ChallengePost.com where there are plenty of opportunities to win money and influence government. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being offered as prizes for the people who can find the best way to do a humanitarian air drop, or to develop nutritious school lunch programs, or to make local public information more readily available, or… Let’s just say, there are plenty of opportunities for the innovative thinker – see for yourself. One challenge that recently ended was the Apps for Development challenge, in which The World Bank invited participants “to create innovative apps using World Bank data.” And they did – 107 submissions later, and we now have a winner! Congratulations and kudos to Frank van Cappelle, of the University of Melbourne, for his app, StatPlanet . This is really worth a look. But only if you have time on your hands, because you are very likely to get yourself absorbed in it. This fully interactive app allows you to easily map, chart, and manipulate a huge chunk of The World Bank’s data, utilizing more options than a liberal arts degree. If you have a point to prove about the global condition, chances are that you can do so here, export it, and show it to whoever it is you feel compelled to prove your point to. Even if you don’t have a point to prove, you can learn a lot in a short space of time with this app because, if a picture says a thousand words, then you have millions of words at your fingertips. Now you can speed read like never before! Here’s how it works:
Posted in Tech News Tags: Development, find-the-best, Fingertips, going-on-over, innovative, People, recently-ended, thousand-words, university, World, world-bank Comments OffStudents Come Up With A Life-Saving Smartphone App That Can Detect Malaria
April 12th, 2011 admin A group of graduate students from around the United States have come up with a life-saving application that will enable healthcare workers located in remote areas all over the world to instantly diagnose malaria. The app is one of the entries in Microsoft’s 9 th annual Imagine Cup, which is a competition open to students with regards to using technology in order to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges. The 2010 Finals were hosted in Poland and this year’s competition will be held on July in New York City with the theme: “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.” And solve these problems the malaria detection app can. Tristan Gibeau, the project’s team leader and a graduate computer engineering student at the University of Central Florida, says of their app: “It’s going to make a difference in trying to contain the outbreak of malaria. In the big picture, it’ll hopefully help in the fight against most diseases out there.” The team’s prototype is comprised of a Samsung Focus smart phone that is running on Windows 7. A microscopic camera lens was fitted to the phone to take detailed shots of blood samples. The team then developed a program that is capable of analyzing the phots taken by detecting for the presence of any malaria parasites, quantifying how much of the parasites are in the sample, and then indicate where they are to the user. Image from World Health Organization. Malaria is a disease that is especially widespread in tropical and subtropical regions and causes coma and even death in severe cases. According to the World Health Organization, over 781,000 people die of the disease every year. Of these cases, 90% of deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, a povery-ridden region where these deaths might have been prevented or lessened had there been adequate healthcare services and hospitals in the area. With regards to the app, Gibeau adds that it can be used to make a diagnosis even in areas without internet access because the processing and analysis takes place in the phone itself. He is also planning to develop on other smart phone applications that will be able to detect sickle cell and other diseases in the future. For now, his priority as well as his team’s is to go to the finals of the Imagine Cup and win the it with their life-saving app. Sources: Reuters ; World Health Organization
Posted in Tech News Tags: central-florida, health, imagine, life, microsoft, phone, university, World, world-health Comments Off
