Tech for Good

Let the doctor do the doctor's job We have all been to a doctor, right? And I am sure everybody had the experience of seeing the doctor care about the patient for 5 minutes and then write his medical notes for 15 minutes out of a 20-minutes session. The burden of clinical documentation makes a lot of bad things. Spending half of the day writing medical notes negatively impacts the doctors' work/life balance and our perception of medical care. But the main issue is that patient does not receive enough attention to his problems, and the quality of medical help suffers as a result. DeepScribe, an AI-powered medical transcription platform, has raised $30 million in Series A funding to solve the issue. Their software listens to a natural doctor-patient conversation, records, summarizes and integrates it into the physician's health record system of choice. For example, the application records patient exams while listening and preparing clinical notes. DeepScribe then uploads the notes directly into Electronic Health Records (EHR) fields. That enables physicians to review and sign their fully equipped notes in the appropriate EHR fields. DeepScribe says its platform saves physicians an average of three hours a day and costs around one-sixth the cost of human medical scribes. The company has saved physicians over 2.5 million minutes of documentation to date. In terms of reliability, DeepScribe says physicians encounter less than one correction per note on average after 20 days of usage. As for the future of its tech, the company hopes to go beyond providing efficiencies for the physician. Their ultimate goal is to improve outcomes for patients. 💡 Article on TechCrunch #AI #medtech #startups

Volkswagen's legend Microbus is back The Verge reports that VW is production-ready with its reincarnation of the iconic Microbus. The company CEO Herbert Diess tweeted that the "legend returns" on March 9th, along with a gif of the long-awaited vehicle. VW revealed the concept of ID Buzz (a strange name for a vehicle) 5 years ago. The legendary Microbus returns fully electric. And I am afraid we do not know any other tech details about the new EV. Another interesting point is that VW plans to use the autonomous ID Buzz as a platform for the automaker's full-scale commercial ride-hailing and delivery operation in Germany in 2025. For that purpose, the carmaker partnered with and invested a staggering $2.6 billion in Argo AI - a Pittsburgh-based startup that Ford also backs. Argo has been testing its vehicles in the US with Ford for the last few years, and now it provides hardware and software for VW's autonomous EVs. 📷 Photos of ID Buzz outfitted with a high-tech suit of sensors and computing smarts. #EV #AI #autonomouscars

Need for Speed in Nevada This year's CES (one of the main tech events globally) featured the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC). They were organized just like Formula 1. Only instead of the phrase "Turn on your engines", it sounded "Start your software." The cars rode along the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where NASCAR races, among others, take place. Nine teams from different countries competed in the qualifying round. Five cars took part in the races; two reached the final. The joined team from Milan Polytech University and the University of Alabama won. Their PoliMOVE racing car set a speed record of 278 km/h (173 mph), and guys took the main prize of $150,000. The second was the car of the Munich Technical University team, which received $50,000. This kind of competition is good for many reasons. They motivate students and young scientists to develop autonomous driving technologies. Demonstrate to the general public the level of progress in this area. They also provide a lot of useful data for improving unmanned vehicles, applicable in ordinary situations of life and business. It is for this purpose that Energy Systems Network organized these races. The company's CEO hopes the initiative will "catapult the industry far ahead." In Las Vegas, the IAC races were held for the second time. The very first took place in Indianapolis last October. 🏎 You can watch the final here: https://youtu.be/PhCAnSw_v4A #autonomouscars

☀️ Here is the Sunday's #weeksummary: 1️⃣ Autonomous trucks on the rise - TuSimple has completed its first fully-autonomous truck run on open public roads without a human in the vehicle 2️⃣ 3D printing of rockets - the world's largest 3D metal printer to print an entire space rocket 3️⃣ Assistance for elderly people - a purpose-built robot to assist the elderly Hope you're all doing well Your Tech for Good

Assistance for elderly people Eldercare has been a big robotics business in Japan due to an aging population. Now the American companies are starting to follow suit. Retriever is one of the best examples of an American company purpose-building a robot to assist people in this way. Their system looks like a small wardrobe with shelves. It can carry up to 25 pounds (11 kg) and can be used to deliver laundry, meals, and other payloads around the house. It features a retractable tray system that can move objects onto the cart from counters, shelves, and a bespoke refrigerator the company says it’s planning to offer. Underneath that is an additional storage space for things like food and medication and a port for charging phones. Users can voice-control via Alexa. The product aims to help those living independently who could still benefit from an added robotic hand. Labrador Systems co-founder/CEO Mike Dooley told Techcrunch, "When pain or other health issues start interfering with your ability to move yourself or other things, even short distances can have a major impact on your independence, quality of life and overall health. The Retriever is meant to help physically bridge some of that gap and empower individuals to be more active and do more on their own." Early adopters can secure a Retriever unit for $1,500 upfront, plus a monthly services fee of between $99 and $149 a month, depending on financing. 🎬 Here is the 4-minute video about the device 💡 Article on TechCrunch #robotics #AI #medtech #startups

3D printing of rockets We have talked about #3dprint -ing of various stuff - homes, prosthetics, wood objects, human skulls. But what about printing rockets? With the world's largest 3D metal printer, Relativity Space startup aims to print an entire space rocket, including fuel tanks and rocket engines, in just 60 days. The way the printer works is the combination of lasers and plasma arc discharge melting raw material, an aluminum wire. The melting point of aluminum is 660 degrees Celsius (1221 F). So the printer melts the whole body of the rocket one tiny bit at a time, 10 inches a second (25 cm/s), to be more exact. To build a traditional rocket, you first need to make building tools. For NASA's next rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), it took 11 years of development to construct the vertical assembly center (VAC), a 170 foot (52 m) tool for welding together the rocket sections. In contrast, Relativity Space is only five years old, and they plan to launch their first rocket, Terran One, in 2022. One of the other benefits of 3D printing is reducing the parts number. Imagine how hot the rocket's combustion chamber gets. The temperature inside is enough to boil iron. How does it not melt? Well, liquid hydrogen passes over and cools it. It is so cool that you can freeze stuff to the exterior of the chamber. That system has 1080 individual small pipes, all having to be welded together. It is an incredibly labor-intensive task. But with 3D printing, you can build all these small (about a 20th the thickness of a human hair) cooling channels as one piece with the chamber. Logically, with a hundred times fewer parts, the 3D-printed rocket's cost is lower than a traditional one. The Relativity Space founder Tim Ellis says it is already five times less, and eventually, they can get to ten or even a hundred times less. The first rocket, Terran One, will be a low earth orbit one. The second one, Terran R, can send a payload to the moon, to Mars. Launching to Mars and building an industrial base on the red planet is actually a long-term vision of the company. As Tim Ellis puts it, "it would expand the possibilities of human experience and what it means to be a person. Like we'd have YouTube channels on Mars, and people sharing what life on Mars is like versus earth." It looks like Tim is not alone in that vision: the company's valuation vaulted to $4.2 billion after a $650 million funding round in summer 2021. 🎬 Terran One nose cone timelapse 🎬 If you're interested here is the longer video (20 minutes) #space #3dprint #startups

Autonomous trucks on the rise Autonomous trucking startup TuSimple has completed its first fully-autonomous run on open public roads without a human in the vehicle. An 80-mile (130 km) run along surface streets and highways between a railyard in Tuscon, Arizona, and a distribution center in Phoenix took 1 hour and 20 minutes. Unmarked police vehicles followed at about a mile behind the truck in case of an emergency stop. A survey vehicle was operating five miles ahead to look for anomalies. An oversight vehicle followed a half-mile behind. Other than these safety precautions, there was no human intervention. That creates a milestone for TuSimple, aiming to full-scale its technology by 2024. TuSimple is one of the most well-known autonomous truck startups surpassing a $1 billion valuation since its 2015 launch. The company develops its own proprietary automated vehicle guidance system that uses AI paired with LiDAR, radar, and HD cameras. Currently, TuSimple retrofits the existing Navistar base trucks with its system. It also plans to design semi-trucks specifically for autonomous operations by 2024. The autonomous truck market is not getting mass attention as the self-driving passenger cars. However, that does not stop its estimated growth from $2.0 billion in 2021 to $4.3 billion by 2026. With the rise of e-commerce, the freight industry faces a lack of freight capacity and an increased demand for truck drivers. Autonomous trucking may be the right solution for that. 💡 Article on TechCrunch #AI #autonomoustrucks #startups

I have started TFG at the end of June. This last post of 2021 is not about more than 1 million views TFG has got this year, though that number is driving me completely nuts. This post is about YOU. Thank everyone for your attention, interest in the content, excellent comments; for challenging me with questions. Without you, the community wouldn't exist and wouldn't be so great. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! As for the future, I think we have not even started - so much more to come. So please stay tuned and see you in 2022. PS. I am starting a top-secret new project in January...

A Lego-Factory and a Cucumber House We have talked about 3D printing of houses, even on Mars, but we have never discussed the homes made of cucumbers. The Brick Wall is a Youtube channel with creative Lego projects. They make fun by helping Lego do unexpected things, like the snow blow train cleaning the railway tracks or lego golf ball picker. Could be also a good pick to watch with your kids. Today's #fun video is about the mega-factory using 18 cucumbers to build a log house. The factory has 21 motors, 7 controllers and consists of more than 23K lego pieces. The video features sharp cutting blades so please be responsible if you try to implement something similar at home ;) #fun #engineering #robotics

Think and type Written communication is critical in our digital world. Imagine the difficulties the patients affected by paralysis are facing in this regard. Blackrock Neurotech, a medical technology company from Salt Lake City, is trying to empower increased independence and quality of life for these people. Their system allows patients to type text by merely imagining themselves writing or typing the words. The platform consists of an implant, miniaturized electronics, software, and a decoder. As a patient is thinking, electrodes implanted in the brain read the electrical firing patterns of neurons and send those signals through a bundle of five patented machine learning software decoders. With this tech, patients with limited communication abilities can create text by thinking or imagining themselves typing or writing by hand. In terms of accuracy, Brackrock's system boasts 94% thought-to-text accuracy. That increases to 99% when the computer system autocorrects the text. The eventual goal is to enable communication functions on par with an able-bodied person. As for the platform's future, the neuroscientists' team sees other benefits, including the restoration of treating or mitigating pain, hearing loss, depression, seizures, memory loss, possibly depression, and many others. 💡 Article on Medgadget #medtech #meddevice #implant #AI #wearables

Electronic wall decoration worker Bangalore-based startup Pace Robotics is building a robot for indoor wall decoration. In India, it turned out, the problems with workers doing repairs are the same as in Russia. There are not enough qualified plasterers and painters. The quality of their work, as well as productivity, is unpredictable and varies from project to project. Srinivas and Ayushmoy, the startup founders, decided that robots were essential. They have created a prototype of a device that does work, on average, ten times faster than a person and three times cheaper. And, most importantly, your wall will look exactly the same across the entire surface, even if you want to make it textured. The entrepreneurs have attracted just over $70K in investments. That is a small amount by the standards of Silicon Valley but quite decent for Indian Bangalore. So far, the team has created only eight copies of the wall decorating robot. We know that the path from this stage to the industrially produced product is thorny and long. But the guys are doing well - there are already four pilot projects, one of which the client paid. The company provides the robot as a service, according to the RaaS model. We will look at them in a year or two. A plasterer-painter priced well below a sports bike for a day of work may come in handy for many. 💡 Article on The Robot Report 🤜 Team's investor pitch 🌐 Company's website #robotics #startups #India

☀️ Here's a late summary of the previous week: 1️⃣ An EV company to watch - Arrival startup challenging Henry Ford's approach to manufacturing 2️⃣ AI to help fight strokes - a startup with a software to identify early signs of strokes and help patients get to the operating room fast 3️⃣ An Angel's Office - a UK's building with exceptional sustainable design 4️⃣ Electric motorcycles coming to Africa - A Swedish-Kenyan Opibus and Uber's alliance to bring electric motorcycles to Africa 5️⃣ 22 electric vehicles for 2022 - the name speaks for itself We will have a poll today or tomorrow - I am thinking of something new for you. Your Tech for Good #weeksummary

22 electric vehicles for 2022 Electrek has published a great article with the 22 most anticipated EVs of 2022. Here are the 22 photos with their names. We have already had a couple of these on TFG. If you wish me to cover any other on the channel, please comment on which one you like. If we get at least 15 comments, I will be happy to write a post or two about the EVs you mentioned. Have a good weekend 🙌 #EV

​Electric motorcycles coming to Africa The motorcycle industry is the single largest employer in Kenya, estimated to provide jobs for over 1.2 million youth. However, all 1.6 million motorcycles registered in the country still operate on gasoline, causing massive emissions and noise pollution. A Swedish-Kenyan tech company Opibus changes this by creating its electric motorcycle priced equivalent with its gasoline counterparts. Earlier this year, Opibus closed a $7.5 million funding round, the largest ever for African electric mobility. And now, the company has partnered with Uber to deploy up to 3,000 electric motorcycles in Africa by 2022. Opibus's electric bike has quite impressive specs. With a top speed of 90 km/h (~56 mph), it can accelerate 0-90 km/h in 5 seconds and has a 160 km (100 mi) range. Motorcycles are popular in Kenya, especially among the youth who use them for work. Opibus's head of marketing and strategy, Albin Wilson, claims that their bike can lower the cost of running a motorcycle by almost 60% on fuel and maintenance: so many fewer parts that break on electric motorcycles, and the fuel price is ever-rising locally. That could be a big deal for the youth and a win for Opibus. 💡 Article on Electrek 🌐 Opibus website #EV #startups

An Angel's Office One Angel Square is an office building located in Manchester, UK, and it is the first building in the UK to achieve BREEAM 'Outstanding' rating. (BREEAM is the world's leading sustainability assessment method for master-planning projects, infrastructure, and buildings). What makes this office space so exceptional? The building's design help in achieving an 80% reduction in carbon emissions, 50% reduction in energy consumption, and a reduction in operating costs of up to 30%. 1️⃣ One Angel Square features a double-skinned façade to minimize heating and cooling throughout the year. Underground concrete earth tubes provide an amount of free heating and cooling for incoming fresh air. 2️⃣ Cooled or heated air rises from the basement through various floors to the roof level, where it passes through a heat-exchanger that recycles the heat to warm the incoming air into the offices below. Carbon dioxide sensors regulate the amount of fresh air circulating in the building and reduce the treated air amount. 3️⃣ The building has 300,000sq ft of exposed concrete that forms the ceilings to the office floors. That acts as a thermal sponge absorbing the heat in the building and reducing the amount of energy needed to cool the building. 4️⃣ A rainwater and greywater harvesting systems ensure low water consumption. A combined heat and power (CHP) system powering the building uses waste cooking oil and rapeseed oil as fuel. The system also supplies excess energy back to the grid. It has electrical pool car charging points and features a building user app that relays real-time user information on how the building is performing. 📷 Some interesting photos of the One Angel Square 💡 Article on ArchDaily #architecture #urbantech #sustainablebuildings

AI to help fight strokes Here is another perfect example of using AI for good. Named by Forbes as one of the next billion-dollar startups, Viz.ai from San Francisco delivers a solution to improve stroke care. Statistics show that each year, about 795,000 people in the United States only have strokes, and of these incidents, 137,000 people die. While practicing as a neurosurgeon in the U.K., Chris Mansi, CEO of Viz.ai, saw firsthand how surgery could go well, yet the patient would die because too much time had passed before getting to the operating room. The company's software uses AI to cross-reference patient's brain CT (computer tomography) images with its database of scans to find early signs of large vessel occlusion strokes. The algorithm reads the scan in 60 seconds, and instead of taking four or five hours and 12 or 13 phone calls, 60 seconds later, an alert goes off on the surgeon's phone. He can see all the images on his smartphone, initiate transport services, and activate the stroke team with a push of a button in the app. Nearly 900 hospitals have already signed up, and Viz.ai became the rare AI technology approved by FDA. The company is now expanding from strokes to the treatment of other common diseases. 🎬 2-minute explanatory video for those interested #AI #medtech #startups

An EV company to watch With almost all big automakers making claims to switch to electric cars in the next decade or two, there is one EV startup standing out from the crowd. Arrival is a London-based company producing electric delivery vans and buses. And what makes it special is the unique approach to EVs from production through delivery. A traditional car factory is a gigantic centralized facility that employs thousands of people, requires over $1 billion to build, and needs to get to very high production levels to make any margin. Arrival challenges the assembly line approach pioneered by Henry Ford with its highly-automated micro-factories employing a few hundred workers. Micro-factory does not require any special foundations and may occupy an existing industrial facility such as a warehouse. It consists of several assembly cells with 3-4 off-the-shelf multitasking robots and can produce tens of thousands of vehicles a year. The advantage, according to Arrival, is that its micro-factories will cost about $50 million (instead of $1 billion) and will allow building vehicles profitably at any volume. This method should also yield vans that cost a lot less than other electric models and even today’s standard, diesel-powered vehicles. The company is also replacing most steel parts used in vehicles with components made from advanced composites, a mix of polypropylene and fiberglass. That allows eliminating from the car plant the paint shop, the giant stamp presses, and the robots that weld metal parts. Besides, that makes the repair and maintenance work for vans easier - Arrival's composite panels can easily be removed and replaced without painting. Arrival has already won over UPS, which has a less than 1 percent stake in the company and plans to buy 10,000 Arrival vans over the next several years. 🎬 2-minute Arrival's video 💡 Article on NY Times #EV #startups

☀️ Here is the Sunday's #weeksummary: 1️⃣ Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 - a supersonic commercial airliner trying to reach audacious goals 2️⃣ The invisible smart lock - a techy home lock with an invisible design 3️⃣ Drone delivery is inevitable - why autonomous drones will soon be the dominant way to deliver small payloads As usual, I would appreciate your thoughts on the channel content. Be safe and have a great start of the next week! Your Tech for Good

Drone delivery is inevitable Yesterday, I read a good article by Byrne Hobart on his "The Diff" blog. Byrne reasons autonomous drones will soon be the dominant way to deliver small payloads—lunch, a snack, coffee, medication, household products. He illustrates the inefficiency of current delivery by car with an example of delivering a 1-pound (0.5 kg) burrito. A person devotes 100% of his time to driving a 2800-lb (1300 kg) car, making a series of turns, and moving at a variable speed because of stop signs, stoplights, and other obstacles. Of the ~2lbs (1 kg) of CO2 emitted in a three-mile drive, 99.6% are spent on moving a person and a vehicle, while the other 0.4% are devoted to moving the food. As for the cost of that transaction, a big chunk is paying a person to maneuver a large vehicle around other rather large vehicles, all to deliver something comparatively tiny. So any small payload that needs timely delivery can be sent more efficiently by a drone than by a car. Alphabet's Wing startup is an excellent example of how autonomous drones can work as a product. Wing had done 100,000 deliveries since launch as of late August in their current markets of Australia, the US, and Finland. An Irish startup Manna, which uses human-operated drones, says its delivery costs are 90% lower than drivers. So once drones have reasonable incremental margins, a decent safety record, and consumer adoption, the main problem to solve would be capital to build drone fleets. And capital has never been more abundant. 🎬 Video about Wing 💡 Article about Manna 💡 Byrne's full blog post #drones #startups #delivery

The invisible smart lock Let us get to the home security products. Founded by ex-Apple employees, Level Home startup has developed a Level Bolt, the smart home lock with an invisible design without monstrous keypads or giant chrome handles. Level Bolt's hardware completely hides inside the lock hole, meaning you can replace the existing hardware, and your door will look the same when you finish. The lock battery is ingeniously hidden inside the bolt - you simply unscrew the end of the deadbolt to replace it. The company says a single 3-volt CR2 cell should last about a year. As a Bluetooth lock, the primary interaction method is via the Level app on your phone. The app design is minimalist. Just tap and hold on to the action panel to open or close the lock. Color coding here tells you the lock status: if the background is white, the lock is open. If black, it is closed. An activity log tells you who came and went and how they opened or closed the lock. You can share access with others via the app. A geofencing auto-unlock system is also available. Having a phone in your pocket opens the door when you approach it. You can also turn on the automatic locking option. The lock integrates with existing voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, and you can unlock the door with a voice command. 🎬 Level Bolt 1-minute video 🌐 Company's website #securitytech #devices #startups