Day: October 7, 2020

Automakers have been playing with solar panels on cars for decades now. In sunny places, on ultra-lightweight, aerodynamic cars covered in them, solar cells can provide propulsion for long periods of time. But on production cars that have safety, comfort and styling considerations, there are limits to what solar panels can do. The solar roof on the Hyundai Sonata Hybrid, for example, can only provide enough energy for a couple miles after a few hours of sun exposure. But what if you could have oodles and oodles of solar panels?

That’s the idea behind the semi-truck trailer that’s being tested by Scania, the European truck manufacturer owned by Volkswagen Group. The trailer is 59 feet long and has solar panels along both sides and the roof. In total, there are 1,507 square feet of solar panels covering the trailer.

Testing of the trailer is being done with Swedish trucking company Ernst Express, which will use it with a plug-in hybrid Scania semi-tractor. While Scania didn’t give an estimate for how many miles of electric range could be added with the trailer, it does estimate an improvement in fuel economy by about 5-10%, and a total energy generation of 14,000 kWh over the course of a year. That may not sound like much, but this is the estimate for Sweden, a country that’s far north and gets less sun than much of the rest of the world. Scania estimates that if the truck and trailer were used in a sunny country such as Spain, the improvement could double.

There’s potential for more than just fuel economy improvements. Scania and the companies it’s partnering with for testing and solar panel development say the trailer could provide power to the electrical grid when it and the truck aren’t in use. We could see such trailers being handy as portable power generators for areas that might be suffering power outages due to storms and other natural disasters.

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Tinnitus, the perception of phantom noises in the absence of actual sound, affects millions of people around the world. According to one recent assessment, approximately one in 10 adults in the U.S. experiences tinnitus—and in nearly a quarter of these individuals, symptoms last for more than 15 years. Those with tinnitus can also experience complications such as difficulty focusing, fatigue, anxiety and an overall reduction in the quality of life.

Psychological interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy can help lessen the distress, but to date, no drug or medical device has been shown to reliably improve this condition. Now researchers have inched closer to making a treatment for tinnitus a reality. According to a new study, published today in Science Translational Medicine, a noninvasive device that applies a technique known as bimodal neuromodulation, combining sounds with zaps to the tongue, may be an effective way to provide relief to tinnitus patients.

According to study co-author Hubert Lim, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and otolaryngology at the University of Minnesota, this treatment targets a subset of brain cells that are firing abnormally. Through studies in both humans and animals, Lim’s team and others previously reported that electrically stimulating touch-sensitive neurons in the tongue or face can activate neurons in the auditory system. Pairing these zaps with sounds appears to rewire brain circuits associated with tinnitus.

The technique developed by Lim and his colleagues is designed to promote the activation of brain circuits in response to many different sounds to drown out phantom noise. “The idea is that eventually your brain gets sensitive to many different things,” Lim explains. “In a way, you have suppressed the tinnitus neurons but only by elevating the other neurons.” Another group led by Susan Shore, a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Michigan, developed a similar device with a different approach: instead of increasing sensitivity to a broad spectrum of sounds, the team’s method pairs a sound that matches the phantom one heard by patients with a specifically timed electrical pulse to the head or neck. In a 2018 study that included 20 people with tinnitus, Shore’s team reported that this technique was effective in reducing the loudness and intrusiveness of the subjects’ tinnitus. “You can think of it as two ways to treat tinnitus,” Lim says. “One is you can try to find [the tinnitus cells] and shut them down. Our approach is to make everything in the auditory system much more hyperactive to everything but the tinnitus.”

To examine the efficacy and safety of their device, Lim and his colleagues conducted a randomized, double-blinded exploratory study with 326 adults who had chronic tinnitus at two sites: St. James’s Hospital in Ireland and the Tinnitus Center at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Participants were instructed to use the device for 60 minutes daily for 12 weeks. They were divided into three groups—each of which received slightly different treatments that varied by the type of sound used, the timing of electrical pulses, and the delay between the sound and the stimulation. The study was funded by Neuromod Devices, a Dublin-based company, where Lim is chief scientific officer, that is developing and selling  the bimodal neuromodulation device.

Results showed that 84 percent of participants completed the 12-week regimen. Afterward, approximately 81 percent of treatment-compliant participants exhibited improvement in psychosocial variables such as the ability to concentrate or sleep, along with lower levels of anxiety and frustration and better quality of life. In around 77 percent of the group, this improvement persisted a year later. Also, 66 percent of participants reported feeling that they had benefited from the device. There were no significant differences in these measures among the three groups.

“The study is very thorough and comprehensive,” says Richard Tyler, an audiologist at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the new study. “Given that, at this point, there is no pill or no surgery available for tinnitus, this work is very important.” He adds that the investigation had some notable shortcomings, however. The most concerning was the lack of a control condition in which some participants would not receive any therapeutic stimulation to rule out placebo effects. Another limitation was that the authors did not report whether the subjects experienced a reduction in tinnitus—actual changes in the perceptions of the phantom sounds. “You have tinnitus, and you have your reactions to tinnitus. Those are two different things,” Tyler says. “If you’re going to try and decrease the tinnitus, then you should be measuring the tinnitus.”

According to Lim, his group chose to focus on how the study participants reacted to tinnitus because patients’ auditory perceptions may vary, depending on how they are affected by the condition. The team did, however, measure perceptual changes and plans to present those findings in a subsequent paper.

“I was impressed with the improvements measured in the patients,” says Rilana Cima, a psychologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in this research but is currently collaborating with some of the co-authors on another study. Although the approach seems promising, it would be useful to see whether a group unaffiliated with the company developing the device would be able to replicate these results, she adds. “I would advise, before we start producing these things en masse, to do that first.”

Neuromod’s bimodal neuromodulation device is currently available through physicians in Ireland and Germany for prices from €2,500 to €2,750 (around $2,900 to $3,200). According to Lim, the company is also seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration to make the treatment available in the U.S. His group also plans further experiments to examine the mechanism underlying its effectiveness. “At this stage, we can say that bimodal stimulation is changing things in the brain,” Lim says. “The next step is to do brain imaging [in humans] and animal experiments to really figure out what has changed in the brain.”

The jury is still out on what might become the most viable business models for augmented reality technology, but in the meantime a startup out of the UK is betting one big area will be in vehicles, in the form of holographic displays. And today it is announcing a significant round of funding from strategic investors to fill out its vision (so to speak).

Envisics, which brings together technologies like computer vision, machine learning, big data analytics and navigation to build hardware that integrates into vehicles to project holographic, head-up displays providing enhanced “dashboards” of information to drivers — with features like mapping, navigation guidance and hazard warnings — is today announcing that it has raised $50 million in a Series B round of funding.

Dr. Jamieson Christmas, the founder of the company, said in an interview that the funding is being made at a valuation of over $250 million, “significantly up” on its previous round, although Envisics, based in the town of Milton Keynes in England, has never disclosed its valuation before.

The capital is coming from a strong group of strategic investors that points to the companies that are already working with the startup. Hyundai Mobis, General Motors Ventures, SAIC Motors and Van Tuyl Companies (the family office of the Van Tuyl Group, which made a fortune in automotive dealerships and related services) all participated in the round.

Envisics is already working with car companies to integrate its technology into vehicles. Initially, it’s focusing on the higher end of the market and integrating its tech into models from Jaguar Land Rover (owned by Tata Motors), Christmas said. Mass production of vehicles using its technology is slated for 2023.

At a time when AR startups have been on somewhat shaky ground, the funding is a validation not just for Envisics, but for the wider market in which it operates.

Christmas first got into holographic displays through his first startup, Two Trees, which eventually got acquired in 2016 by Daqri, and AR glasses company that was looking for more tech to better compete with Microsoft and its HoloLens.

Christmas said that while Daqri was focused on headsets, he still saw an opportunity to work on holographic tech for automakers (indeed, when it was acquired, Two Trees already had automotive customers).

That eventually led to Christmas, two years later in 2018, spinning out Envisics (once again as a UK startup, like his previous one) to focus just on the holographic automotive opportunity.

It turned out to be a very timely move: Daqri eventually shut down in September 2019 after failing to find its footing as a business and running out of money in what was already a challenging climate for AR. It was not the only one: other casualties at that time included patent and asset sales from the Osterhout Design Group and Meta.

If Envisics managed to jump off the burning platform that was AR headset displays, it arguably went from the frying pan into the fire (excuse the mixing of a few heated metaphors): billions of dollars have been invested into the automotive sector and its hot pursuit of what it hopes will be the next generation of transportation, autonomous vehicles.

Yet if you think AR has yet to find a landing place as a business, self-driving cars are even further from their destination. Experts agree that we are many years away still from fully-autonomous vehicles capable of making decisions as reliably as humans, and some skeptics wonder if we’ll ever get there at all.

Enter technology like Envisics’. The company’s tools are not a replacement for human drivers, but they definitely enhance how a human can drive, and in the many steps that we’ll see between today and some future where cars can actually drive themselves, tech like Envisics’ will continue to play a vital and interesting role, one that you can imagine has lots of room to evolve along with the cars themselves. (For example, today it provides vital data; tomorrow it could also provide… useful diversions if you no longer have to do any driving?)

“Hyundai Mobis will jointly develop autonomous driving specialized AR HUDs with Envisics, targeting mass production by 2025,” Executive Vice President, CTO, Sung Hwan Cho said in a statement. “We will proactively present the next generation AR HUD to global automakers with increased safety and convenience to avoid distracting the driver.”

“GM is very impressed with Envisics’ holographic augmented reality-enhanced head-up display technology,” added Matt Tsien, president of GM Ventures. “This technology will help us revolutionize the in-vehicle experience with a variety of safe, highly integrated and intuitive applications, including applications that will enhance the hands-free driving experience in future EVs, like the Cadillac LYRIQ.”

“We are very excited to be part of Envisics journey to commercialize its revolutionary holographic technology and look forward to partnering with them to deploy advanced AR-HUDs in our next generation of cars for both the Chinese domestic and global markets,” said Michael Cohen, Investment Director at SAIC Capital, in his own statement.

After a protracted 16-month investigation that involved the tech world’s biggest names being grilled by Congress, the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust has released its report. The findings are, unsurprisingly, that Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook hold “monopoly power” in tech spaces and that action should be taken to reduce or limit it.

The report concluded that each of the four companies holds monopoly power over a different section of the industry–Apple over “software distribution on iOS devices,” Google “in the market for general online search,” Facebook “in the market for social networking,” and Amazon “over most third-party sellers and many of its suppliers.”

The recommendations are extensive, and would represent sweeping changes to existing antitrust laws. They include recommendations such as prohibiting dominant platforms from entering “adjacent lines of business,” such as Facebook acquiring Instagram, or Google acquiring YouTube. Interestingly, Google chose not to acquire Twitch back in 2014 due to antitrust concerns, already having video giant YouTube under its belt.

Another recommendation, if passed into law, would require antitrust agencies to presume huge mergers to be anticompetitive, meaning companies would have to prove a merger wouldn’t be anticompetitve, rather than enforcers having to prove it would be.

The full report is available here, providing a comprehensive breakdown of how dominant tech companies have thus far been allowed to run riot. “By controlling access to markets, these giants can pick winners and losers throughout our economy,” the Chairs’ forward reads. “They not only wield tremendous power, but they also abuse it by charging exorbitant fees, imposing oppressive contract terms, and extracting valuable data from the people and businesses that rely on them.”

“To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.”

The report’s conclusion may be good news for Epic Games, who have been embroiled in a legal battle with Apple over the latter’s control of microtransactions in games played on iOS devices. The Committee’s recommendations aren’t guaranteed to become law, however–the report was notably Democrat-led, leading to questions over how much support the proposed changes will see from Republicans.

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