Embedded Systems

Getting rid of cables give more freedom of movement for hospital patients and it is little wonder that Bluetooth is being integrated into blood pressure monitors, writes Mel Smith from 2001 Electronics Having the majority of consumer personal area networking devices covered, Bluetooth is making its way to medical equipment. Driving this evolution are the proven technology, reliability, being a ...

Just a month after promoting its new Core Duo processor to loyalists at the Intel Developers Forum, Intel executives began hawking the chip to a new crowd – embedded developers. Rather than pushing its XScale processor at the Embedded Systems Conference this week, Doug Davis, v-p of the digital enterprise group at Intel and general manager of its communications infrastructure ...

Oxfordshire-based micromachined sensor firm Oxsensis expects to have sensor prototypes operating inside jet engines before the end of this year. “We will have lab products later this year and expect production in 2007-08,” chief executive offcier David Gahan told Electronics Weekly. Oxsensis is a spin-out from the central microstructure facility of the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Its creation was prompted in ...

New technology can sometimes make a rapid and major impact, such as mobile phones and MP3 players which evolved in a relatively short space of time. But the speed at which technology evolves does not necessarily dictate the impact it will have. RFID (radio frequency identification) has evolved relatively slowly, but it is anticipated that it will have an enormous ...

Troublesome people, hackers. A weekend with no interruptions and by Monday they will have dreamt up a clever new way to steal your electronic data. For a device with an accessible security chip (typically we’re talking about smartcards), a nice entry point is the information that leaks out through the way the chip operates. By monitoring standard characteristics such as ...

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a robot that can identify objects by type. The system is still very primitive, but it is a step towards a cognitive machine with integrated language and vision processing. “We’ve succeeded to an extent in getting the robot to understand in a very simple way the references to the objects, in terms ...

R4513 is a rat pioneer. Thanks in part to R4513, researchers from two UK universities should this summer complete a robot rodent that uses whiskers to collect information about its environment. Over the last 30 months the Whiskerbot project has been developing models of how the rat uses its whiskers, how the information is interpreted at the follicle, and how ...

SeaBED is an underwater survey robot which recently proved electronics could take the boring bits out of underwater archaeology. “The consensus was it would take a team two field seasons to do the work that we did in a day,” archaeologist Brendan Foley of the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told Electronics Weekly. Foley was the only US archaeologist on ...

Biometric and identity card specialist TSSI Systems has attacked UK Government plans for a national ID card scheme, casting doubt over the security of the proposed system. Swindon-based TSSI said the encryption technology that will be implemented in the cards is crucial to the scheme’s success. “The main concern with ID cards is forgery. The Government has chosen biometrics to ...

Conventional computing methods can solve most data processing and control tasks as long as you throw enough high-speed silicon at the problem. Our brains, though, can complete some remarkably complex tasks, faster than a room full of computers, and yet we achieve this with neurons that do not respond in much less than a millisecond. That networks of biological neurons ...