A tiny chip from semiconductor company Wiliot could harvest energy out of thin air, the company claims. No battery needed. Instead, the paper-thin device pulls power from ambient radio frequencies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell signals, allowing it to measure things like weight and temperature, and transmit the information to nearby devices. The company recently closed a $30 million funding round with investors that included Amazon and Samsung.
Wiliot’s Bluetooth chip is the epitome of discreet. About the size of a postage stamp, it can be cheaply produced and mounted pretty much anywhere — on shirts as a high-tech clothing label or on consumer goods as a way to track conditions during transport. The company says it’s in talks with device manufacturers interested in prototyping applications.
Steve Statler, vice president of marketing and business development at Wiliot, described some of the device’s myriad potential applications. “Products will be able to have the lost and found capabilities built-in so that many more items will be tracked if they are lost or stolen without the size or limitations in battery life that have limited this in the past,” he told Digital Trends. “Items of clothing with Bluetooth in their care label will be able to talk to your washing machine to make sure they are not ruined with the wrong wash cycle or turn pink by being mixed with other items. With your permission, your phone will be able to track what is in your wardrobe and when it is worn, so that styling recommendations won’t just be based on what you bought but what you like.”
Retailers could benefit from the tag’s ability to track inventory in transit to and from the store, while keeping track of the store’s inventory in real time to avoid items being stolen or going out of stock.
“We will even be able to detect which products are picked up and tried on in stores so that advertising and promotion will be more effective,” Statler said.
While we shudder at the thought of advertisers having access to our shopping decisions, Wiliot does offer compelling possibilities for the Internet of Things.
After its recent funding round, Wiliot now aims to build on its tag’s commercial scalability, while implanting features like encryption and biodegradability, before a commercial rollout in 2020. The company hasn’t yet determined a price for the device.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.