Information & Communication

The High Tech Gadget market is evolving very fast, with very strong competitors in each sector individual sector, making it difficult for everyone to really impress the consumers globally at once. But Google, with its gadgets integrating the best hardware, software and advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) together did it!

Robots are becoming more and more common in our everyday lives. Many people may own, or aspire to own, high-end toys that, while they may not be perceived as robots, fall into that category. These include quadcopter drones and AI-powered, remote-controlled toys such as the Sphero™ line of products. Robots also serve practical ends, in the form of automatic cleaning machines including Roombas™.

Smart home devices are becoming increasingly popular. They are marketed as electronics that can take the work out of monitoring your home, doing your shopping, turning on heating and monitoring your energy consumption. These Internet of Things (IoT) based products connect your home to the online world, by making shopping for things on websites such as Amazon easy or even automatic.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a form of dementia characterised by the loss of long-term memories, possible emotional disturbances and behavioural abnormalities. It is strongly associated with advanced age, although cases of early-onset Alzheimer’s have also been observed. AD has a specific pathophysiology, or biological mechanism of progression.

Many of us have come across the concept of human-powered electronics and machines – the most popular example probably being the first Matrix movie or One Million Merits (the Black Mirror episode starring Daniel Kaluuya). However, reading about it on the internet afterwards may have rubbished the mechanics, which are often presented in rather horrible contexts, of getting appreciable amounts of energy out of human motion or physiology.

Graphene is a fascinating and relatively novel material that may have a whole range of applications in the areas of electronics and engineering in the near future. It is a superconductor that has recently demonstrated the ability to co-exist with silicon to enhance the capabilities of this complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS).

The iPhone X was released at the 2017 Apple Keynote event, possibly planned as a ‘tenth anniversary’ add-on to the debuts of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. Unlike these incremental updates, the X included a range of firsts for the mobile devices released by the Cupertino hardware giants, including an OLED panel, a (somewhat) edge-to-edge display, three-gigabyte RAM solution… and the first phone without a home button.

Some of us may think of robots as machines we’ve created to mimic human or animal motion, gait, gestures and forms. They are also very often designed to manipulate things in a way that approximates the human ability to do so, in order to complete tasks and automated processes. However, there are engineers and scientists who assert that robots would be more effective, adaptable and useful if they conformed to more unique or interchangeable form factors.

The concept of wearable technology has revolutionized not only the fields of health and medicine, but has also found a place in the electronics and appliances in our homes. Since acoustic interactions have become a way of life, a medium connecting humans and flexible wearables is definitely both progressive and convenient.

Voice activation is becoming an increasingly popular form of computer interface, thanks to the availability and uptake of systems such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa. These are AI assistants housed in devices that don’t need buttons or keyboards to operate them, and can organise things, complete online orders and give information on different things in response to different commands.

FinFET-based computer processors are one of the great breakthroughs of this age. Their form factors and architectures have allowed for the development of nearly every chip in nearly every device that enhance and sometimes define our lives today. Without these silicon microstructures, computerised gadgets as we know them might not have progressed to the relative power and portability they demonstrate as productivity and media-consumption tools.

Synthetic facial recognition is demonstrably making the transition from action or spy movies to real life. This technological revolution is based on the ability of cameras to pick up the image of a face to process, analyse and ultimately identify people based on their facial characteristics. Companies such as NEC believe that computerised facial recognition can form the backbone of a modern security system, be they public or corporate.