Showing posts with label muscles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label muscles. Show all posts

New System to Watch Workers

Spying is everywhere these days and researchers with employer backing are studying the way employees move during work tasks. They don't seem to care what effect this has on a workers mental state, considering you will have a contraption fitted that will go into the bathroom with you.

The DorsaVi company based in Melbourne has developed a monitoring system called ViSafe. It attaches to the body by means of sticky pads that measures muscle impulses and body motion. Critically, it measures the speed at which one is moving. This will help to make the employee move faster by explaining that he/she does not move fast enough during work hours - hands up for running on the spot!

Data are examined by the subject, researcher, workplace assessor, oh and another employee who is there to make up the numbers. Just where workplace assessor gets his skills and expertise from is a mystery. Like those wonderful abstract tests they give to job applicants that are never tested in real life situations - indeed, which are irrelevant to real life and measure, well, nothing actually.

It is okay to use such technology on sports people, but in the workplace they can cause a build up of stress in employees that employers with there great intelligence cannot seem to understand. This is mainly because employers can please themselves about what they do during the day and workers cannot. Employees are trapped in a prison of compulsory work tasks. "ViSafe can tell you in a quantifiable way how far a worker can bend over." That will prove useful.
Technology by Ty Buchanan

Muscles Created for Nanobots

Can nanobots have muscles? Researchers have made very strong, flexible muscles that could be used by nanobots to travel around the body diagnosing and treating medical conditions.

As flexible limbs much like octopus tentacles, artificial muscles can move objects a thousand times heavier. Thinner than a human hair, the "yarns" are cheap to make. They could potentially be used for pumps, valves, stirrers and flagella for drug discovery.

They were created by applying an electrochemical charge to spun carbon nanotubes making them twist into helical yarns. They are ideal to attach to bots as a tiny tail, a flagella, to propel the bot forward.

This was a truly international breakthrough. Participants in the work were the University of Wollongong, Australia, the University of Texas and Hanyang University of Korea.
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Science