Interactive Report Maps Landscape of Technology for the Aging

The Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST) today released an interactive version of their "State of Technology in Aging Services Report" that lays out the categories of technologies that exist and are under development to meet the needs of aging consumers and highlights what companies are doing to serve this growing market segment.

This version, which can be found online at http://www.agingtech.org/, builds on the March 2008 publication, "The State of Technology in Aging Services," and includes links to the numerous corporations, universities and aging-services providers who are advancing technologies that can help older people stay healthy and independent longer.

The types of technology include:

Sensors which can detect and notify a caregiver if a person is potentially unsafe (e.g. have fallen, did not get out of his chair or turn off the stove).

Health technologies that monitor blood pressure, respiration and other conditions in real time while the person is at home. This reduces the need for doctor's visits and notifying caregivers immediately of significant changes.

Medication dispensers that provide the appropriate medicines at the appropriate time and remind a person to take them.

Computer games that provide social networking, promote brain stimulation and even use diagnostic games to monitor a person's cognitive abilities.

The report also includes interviews with expert researchers, who conclude that factors ranging from interconnectivity between different systems to usability, affordability and the availability of technical support and training will determine how widespread these technologies will become.

"Older consumers are becoming increasingly more interested in technology and small and large corporations are working to meet this demand," says Majd Alwan, director of CAST. "Our study shows that we can create a network of technology-driven services to help people stay at home and achieve better outcomes at the same time.

"Aging-services providers are partnering with technology companies to provide comprehensive service packages," Alwan adds. "Consumers should be as aware of these options as they are aware of their cell phone plans or cable television offerings."

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Possible Mechanism for Enormous Electromechanical Response

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Stony Brook University, Johns Hopkins University, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have discovered that nanosized regions with local polarizations, or "electric dipoles," in a special class of otherwise disordered materials may underlie these materials' extreme electromechanical response to an external electric field or physical deformation.

"Such materials show enormous potential for industrial applications such as next-generation sensors, actuators, and transducers that convert between mechanical and electrical forms of energy," says Brookhaven Lab physicist Guangyong Xu, lead author on a paper describing the work published online by Nature Materials May 11, 2008.

Known as relaxor ferroelectrics, or relaxors for short, these materials have the ability to deform significantly in response to an electric field, or conversely, to have an electric current induced within them by a deforming physical force.

This property, known as a piezoelectric response, is ideal for producing sensors and other devices. Understanding the origin of some materials' extreme piezoelectric response may lead to the development of improved materials for a variety of applications.

Scientists have known that changes in small areas of a material can sometimes have drastic effects on the behavior of the bulk material. Many have investigated the effects of "polar nanoregions" -- tiny, nanometer-scale regions of ordered electric dipole moments -- on the long range polar order in these materials. But the relationship between polar nanoregions and the
electromechanical and other structural properties of relaxor systems remained unclear, until now.

The Brookhaven team and their collaborators have established a link between polar nanoregions and the materials' crystal structure and lattice dynamics in a relaxor system.

"Our work provides a scenario wherein the interaction of polar nanoregions and the bulk lattice introduces an underlying structural instability, which could provide the microscopic origin of the large piezoelectric properties of relaxor systems," Xu says.

In general, atoms in solids can move about their "set" positions in the crystal lattice and propagate energy in the form of sound waves. The scientists have found a strong interaction between polar nanoregions and the propagation of these sound waves, the visibility of which can be enhanced with the application of an external electric field.

By comparing how these sound waves propagate in different directions, the scientists observed a large asymmetry in the response of the lattice. This directional dependency of the response appears to be induced by the polar nanoregions.

In order to be a good piezoelectric material, the lattice shape must be able to change significantly in response to an external electric field. Theoretical work has suggested that a phase instability may be responsible for this effect. The directional dependence of sound wave propagation in the current study provides strong evidence that such a phase instability does exist and is indeed induced by the polar nanoregions. This intrinsic instability apparently helps to facilitate the field-induced structural change and contributes to the large piezoelectric response.

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Cell Phone Sensors Detect Radiation to Thwart Nuclear Terrorism

Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological "dirty bombs" and nuclear weapons.

Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach. Fischbach is working with Jere Jenkins, director of Purdue's radiation laboratories within the School of Nuclear Engineering.

"It's the ubiquitous nature of cell phones and other portable electronic devices that give this system its power," Fischbach says. "It's meant to be small, cheap and eventually built into laptops, personal digital assistants and cell phones."

The system was developed by Andrew Longman, a consulting instrumentation scientist. Longman developed the software for the system and then worked with Purdue researchers to integrate the software with radiation detectors and cell phones. Cellular data air time was provided by AT&T.

The research has been funded by the Indiana Department of Transportation through the Joint Transportation Research Program and School of Civil Engineering at Purdue.

"The likely targets of a potential terrorist attack would be big cities with concentrated populations, and a system like this would make it very difficult for someone to go undetected with a radiological dirty bomb in such an area," says Longman, who also is Purdue alumnus. "The more people are walking around with cell phones and PDAs, the easier it would be to detect and catch the perpetrator. We are asking the public to push for this."

Tiny solid-state radiation sensors are commercially available. The detection system would require additional circuitry and would not add significant bulk to portable electronic products, Fischbach says.

The technology is unlike any other system, particularly because the software can work with a variety of sensor types, he says.

"Cell phones today also function as Internet computers that can report their locations and data to their towers in real time," Fischbach says. "So this system would use the same process to send an extra signal to a home station. The software can uncover information from this data and evaluate the levels of radiation."

The researchers tested the system in November, demonstrating that it is capable of detecting a weak radiation source 15 feet from the sensors.

"We set up a test source on campus, and people randomly walked around carrying these detectors," Jenkins says. "The test was extremely safe because we used a very weak, sealed radiation source, and we went through all of the necessary approval processes required for radiological safety. This was a source much weaker than you would see with a radiological dirty bomb."

Officials from the Indiana Department of Transportation participated in the test.

"The threat from a radiological dirty bomb is significant, especially in metropolitan areas that have dense populations," says Barry Partridge, director of INDOT's Division of Research and Development.

Long before the sensors would detect significant radiation, the system would send data to a receiving center.

"The sensors don't really perform the detection task individually," Fischbach says. "The collective action of the sensors, combined with the software analysis, detects the source. The system would transmit signals to a data center, and the data center would transmit information to authorities without alerting the person carrying the phone. Say a car is transporting radioactive material for a bomb, and that car is driving down Meridian Street in Indianapolis or Fifth Avenue in New York. As the car passes people, their cell phones individually would send signals to a command center, allowing authorities to track the source."

The signal grows weaker with increasing distance from the source, and the software is able to use the data from many cell phones to pinpoint the location of the radiation source.

"So the system would know that you were getting closer or farther from something hot," Jenkins said. "If I had handled radioactive material and you were sitting near me at a restaurant, this system would be sensitive enough to detect the residue. "

The Purdue Research Foundation owns patents associated with the technology licensed through the Office of Technology Commercialization.

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New Faraway Sensors Warn of Emerging Hurricane's Strength

A new study supported by NASA and the U.S. Office of Naval Research takes forecasters one step further to improving their ability to predict just how powerful an oncoming storm may become by using highly-sensitive sensors located thousands of miles from the storm to detect lightning outbreaks within a hurricane’s most dangerous area.

Researchers can now investigate with greater accuracy how the rate of lightning strikes produced within a hurricane's eyewall is tied to the changing strength of that hurricane. A hurricane’s eyewall is the inner heat-driven region of the storm that surrounds the “eye” where the most intense rainfall and most powerful winds occur. By monitoring the intensity of lightning near a hurricane’s eye, scientists will be able to improve their forecasts of when a storm will unleash its harshest conditions.

During the study, researchers used data from a growing network of new, long-range, ground-based lightning sensors, a NASA satellite and aircraft-based sensors. They explored the relationship between eyewall lightning outbreaks and the intensity of two of the most severe Atlantic storms on record before they made U.S. landfall: category five hurricanes Katrina and Rita. An article on this research, also supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, will be published in the American Meteorological Society's Monthly Weather Review later this year.

"There are very few observing systems that offer a broad view of a storm over the open ocean where hurricanes tend to build or lose strength," says lead author Kirt Squires, a recent graduate of the meteorology program at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. "What’s really compelling about the new sensors is their increased sensitivity to pick up lightning's electromagnetic signal over water from such a long distance. As a result, we can see thunderstorm activity over the ocean from thousands of miles away for the first time. This development is essential to improving the way meteorologists can look at a growing storm to judge just how harsh it will be."

When water condenses from vapor into a cloud droplet, latent or hidden heat is released, which in turn builds updrafts – air moving upwards in a cloud. Latent heat provides the energy that fuels hurricanes. If the ensuing updrafts are strong enough, they can cause the separation of charge that produces lightning. The tight correlation between the rate of lightning strikes, the amount of rainfall and the heat released in the eyewall of a storm allows the lightning rate data to be useful in computer models that forecast hurricane track and intensity.

"Hurricane forecasters and researchers are very interested in developing methods that allow a continuous examination of the structural growth of the eyewall within hurricanes," says co-author Steven Businger, a senior professor of meteorology at the University of Hawaii. "The fact that lightning is directly linked to the heat energy released in the eyewall makes it a priority for us to examine the evolution of lightning within a storm."

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