Novelties: A Wearable Alert to Head Injuries in Sports

Head injuries can come from a single jarring impact during a game, or from a series of smaller jolts. But in the midst of play, many blows aren’t necessarily easy to spot by coaches, physicians or parents in attendance.

A crop of new lightweight devices that athletes can wear on the field may help people on sidelines keep better track of hits to players’ heads during games and practice sessions. The devices, packed with sensors and microprocessors, register a blow to a player’s skull and immediately signal the news by blinking brightly, or by sending a wireless alert.

Athletes can wear the devices pressed tightly to their heads, held in place by a headband within a beanie, for example, or even by an adhesive patch and Velcro.

Many of the systems are in research and development, but a few products are coming to the market this summer, including the CheckLight, a washable beanie created jointly by MC10 and Reebok. The beanie has an electronics module tucked inside it; a blow to the head sets off an LED readout on the outside. It starts blinking in yellow if the impact is moderate, or red if it is severe.

The CheckLight can be worn under a helmet for football or hockey, or by itself for soccer and other helmet-free sports. An MC10 spokeswoman said it would be available later this month at the Reebok Web site ($150).

Another sensor, the X-Patch from X2 Biosystems in Seattle, attached directly to a player’s head, sends data about hits wirelessly to the sidelines. The product will be out this fall, said Christoph Mack, X2’s C.E.O., who did not disclose the price.

Dr. Robert C. Cantu, a neurosurgery professor at the Boston University School of Medicine and medical director of the Sports Legacy Institute, which is seeking to prevent brain trauma in athletes, says he has looked into many of the new sensors as they have been developed. He’s in favor of them.

“They give you a rough estimate of total number of hits to the head the person has taken,” information of great importance to coaches, parents and athletes themselves, he said. “You don’t want to get a high number of hits,” he said, “because there is no hit that is good for your head.”

But the new devices shouldn’t be used to diagnose concussions, Dr. Cantu warned. “There’s no magic number you can read on a device that means you have a concussion,” he said. “Many more factors besides forces are involved.” Concussions can occur under a wide range of conditions, and no clear impact threshold has been established.

Stefan Duma, head of the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, welcomed the new generation of sensors, particularly if they can be worn by women and by young players — both understudied populations in the world of contact sports and brain injury. “They may help us understand more about the risks that come with head impacts,” he said.

But he also had reservations about the devices, which he said could introduce a range of tricky problems. If a youth team on the field suddenly has several blinking lights, who will tend to the various players? What qualifications will the sidelines staff need?

Another issue could arise if opposing athletes see strategic possibilities in setting off the signals. “Players might target people and get their lights blinking to get them removed from the game,” he said.

The CheckLight was developed by Reebok, which makes the beanie, and MC10, a start-up in Cambridge, Mass., that is developing a line of flexible and stretchable electronics. Sensors in the cap — a tiny accelerometer and gyroscope — measure the head’s forward and twisting movements, said Steven Fastert, director of product development at MC10. An algorithm evaluates the impact, deciding if the hit is negligible, moderate or severe.

The sensor can be used for about 13 hours continuously and can be recharged with a USB cable. The total number of hits can be read when the battery is recharged.

In research projects, scientists have long used special football helmets with instruments embedded inside them to measure head impacts. Dr. Dumas of Virginia Tech, for example, has used such helmets in his research for 11 years with its football players.

“I’m glad to see more systems and technologies coming to expand measurement outside the helmet,” he said.

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

Disruptions: Privacy Challenges of Wearable Computing

Pam Berry/The Boston Globe Thad Starner, second from right, is a technical adviser to the Google Glass team. He said he believed most people are respectful and would not use wearable computers inappropriately.

Perhaps the best way to predict how society will react to so-called wearable computing devices is to read the Dr. Seuss children’s story “The Butter Battle Book.”

The book, which was published in 1984, is about two cultures at odds. On one side are the Zooks, who eat their bread with the buttered side down. In opposition are the Yooks, who eat their bread with the buttered side up. As the story progresses, their different views lead to an arms race and potentially an all-out war.

Well, the Zooks and the Yooks may have nothing on wearable computing fans, who are starting to sport devices that can record everything going on around them with a wink or subtle click, and the people who promise to confront violently anyone wearing one of these devices.

I’ve experienced both sides of this debate with Google’s Internet-connected glasses, Google Glass. Last year, after Google unveiled its wearable computer, I had a brief opportunity to test it and was awe-struck by the potential of this technology.

A few months later, at a work-related party, I saw several people wearing Glass, their cameras hovering above their eyes as we talked. I was startled by how much Glass invades people’s privacy, leaving them two choices: stare at a camera that is constantly staring back at them, or leave the room.

Memoto Memoto can snap two photos a minute and later upload it to an online service.

This is not just a Google issue. Other gadgets have plenty of privacy-invading potential. Memoto, a tiny, automatic camera that looks like a pin you can wear on a shirt, can snap two photos a minute and later upload it to an online service. The makers of the device boast that it comes with one year of free storage and call it “a searchable and shareable photographic memory.”

Apple is also working on wearable computing products, filing numerous patents for a “heads-up display” and camera. The company is also expected to release an iWatch later this year. And several other start-ups in Silicon Valley are building products that are designed to capture photos of people’s lives.

But what about people who don’t want to be recorded? Don’t they get a say?

Deal with it, wearable computer advocates say. “When you’re in public, you’re in public. What happens in public, is the very definition of it,” said Jeff Jarvis, the author of the book “Public Parts” and a journalism professor at the City University of New York. “I don’t want you telling me that I can’t take pictures in public without your permission.”

Mr. Jarvis said we’ve been through a similar ruckus about cameras in public before, in the 1890s when Kodak cameras started to appear in parks and on city streets.

The New York Times addressed people’s concerns at the time in an article in August 1899, about a group of camera users, the so-called Kodak fiends, who snapped pictures of women with their new cameras.

“About the cottage colony there is a decided rebellion against the promiscuous use of photographing machines,” The Times wrote from Newport, R.I. “Threats are being made against any one who continues to use cameras as freely.” In another article, a woman pulled a knife on a man who tried to take her picture, “demolishing” the camera before going on her way.

This all sounds a bit like the Yooks and Zooks battling over their buttered bread.

Society eventually adapted to these cameras, but not without some struggle, a few broken cameras and lots of court battles. Today we live in a world with more than a billion smartphones with built-in cameras. But, there is a difference between a cellphone and a wearable computer; the former goes in your pocket or purse, the latter hangs on your body.

“Most people are not talking about privacy here, they are talking about social appropriateness,” said Thad Starner, who is the director of the Contextual Computing Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a technical adviser to the Google Glass team. He said he believed most people are respectful and would not use their wearable computers inappropriately.

Mr. Starner has been experimenting with different types of wearable computers for over 20 years, and he said that although some people are initially skeptical of the computer above his eye, they soon feel comfortable around the device, and him. “Within two weeks people start to ignore it,” he said. Over the years, his wearable computers have become less obtrusive, going from bulky, very visible contraptions, to today’s sleeker Google Glass.

Mr. Starner said privacy protections would have to be built into these computers. “The way Glass is designed, it has a transparent display so everyone can see what you’re doing.” He also said that in deference to social expectations, he puts his wearable glasses around his neck, rather than on his head, when he enters private places like a restroom.

But not everyone is so thoughtful, as I learned this month at the Google I/O developer conference when people lurked around every corner, including the bathroom, wearing their glasses that could take a picture with a wink.

By the end of “The Butter Battle Book,” the arms race has escalated to a point at which both sides have developed bombs that can destroy the world. As two old men, a Yook and a Zook, debate what to do next, the story ends with one saying: “We’ll just have to be patient. We’ll see, we’ll see.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Bits Blog: Jack Dorsey Talks Square and Wearable Devices

Mary Altaffer/Associated Press Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Square, said he fancied devices that wrap around the wrist.

Many technology enthusiasts have had their eye on Glass, Google’s monocle that looks like something out of Star Trek. But the Internet-connected eyewear doesn’t really pique the interest of Jack Dorsey, chief executive of the mobile payment system Square and a co-founder of Twitter.

“Glasses are very compelling, and I think it’s an amazing technology,” Mr. Dorsey said, “but I just can’t imagine my mom wearing them right now. What is the value of Glass?”

Mr. Dorsey said he fancied devices that wrap around the wrist, like smartwatches or exercise bands, because they felt more natural. The conversation might hint that Square is considering a payment app for a smartwatch, perhaps the watch from Apple that has long been rumored to be in the works.

Mr. Dorsey shared his thoughts last Friday while at a grilled cheese shop in New York to talk about a new feature in Square’s cash-register software for iPads. The new feature allows restaurant owners to speed up the process of placing customized food orders with Square’s cash-register app for iPads, called Register.

With the new software, a restaurant can more easily customize orders. For example, if a customer chooses a grilled cheese sandwich, but wants it with gluten-free bread and extra peppers, the merchant can hit the grilled cheese sandwich button and then individually select the type of bread and extra peppers. In the past, a merchant would have needed to create a separate button in advance for each variation of each sandwich offered — for example, one for a regular grilled cheese sandwich, one for a grilled cheese with wheat bread and one with gluten-free bread and extra peppers.

Mr. Dorsey answered several of our questions about Square and its future. A transcript of the interview follows, edited for length and clarity.

What’s the message behind the news about the customized food orders?

People have known Square for accepting credit cards. This is a big push we’re making into smaller businesses and brick and mortar, specifically around restaurants. There’s this huge movement around quick-service restaurants all over the country, especially in places like New York, where you order at a counter. Food trucks are often an offshoot of this. These places are doing really creative crafty things and doing them very well.

When it comes to speeding up food orders for businesses, some of your competitors are enabling the ability for customers to order ahead and pay with an app, then skip the line and grab the food. Are you looking into that capability, too?

That’s definitely something we hear about it and it’s something we’d naturally want to do.

Last year Square introduced the ability for customers to pay with their face through Square Wallet, its payment app. Are people using that feature a lot, or is it just tech nerds?

We do have early adopters. I don’t want to disparage tech nerds because they’re the ones that spread things like Twitter and Facebook. I think we’ve been happy with the residence of Wallet, but we haven’t been thrilled. A lot of that is due to people understanding how to use it. We have a lot more work to do to surface it.

For those who use it, they love it. For the merchants who receive it, they love it. They get to know their customers as they walk in, what they like, what they might order, and it increases their revenue.

How has the Starbucks partnership been going? Have you seen an increase in users?

We definitely saw a surge in Wallet. We definitely saw a surge in Register, actually. It really validates the high end. They’re using the same tool that these guys are using, they’re using the same infrastructure. It really levels the playing field for them to compete with each other. It really validates that this is something businesses can trust —this huge company is using it, and I can also build my business on it.

Have you looked into Google Glass?

I don’t think glasses are the answer. I think it might be a 10-year answer, but not in the next five years. Maybe if they’re in sunglasses or what not.

I think the movement you see around Fitbit, Up and FuelBand, that seems to be the next step in wearable. So something on the wrist that feels natural, almost feels a bit like jewelry.

Glasses are very compelling and I think it’s an amazing technology, but I just can’t imagine my mom wearing them right now. What is the value of Glass?

Sounds like you have a lot more faith in the rumored iWatch.

(Laughs.) I don’t know, I think there’s a lot going on. The Pebble watch I think is pretty compelling as well.

Digital Domain: Wearable Video Cameras, for Police Officers

Now, some police departments are using miniaturized video cameras and their microphones to capture, in full detail, officers’ interactions with civilians. The cameras are so small that they can be attached to a collar, a cap or even to the side of an officer’s sunglasses. High-capacity battery packs can last for an extended shift. And all of the videos are uploaded automatically to a central server that serves as a kind of digital evidence locker.

William A. Farrar, the police chief in Rialto, Calif., has been investigating whether officers’ use of video cameras can bring measurable benefits to relations between the police and civilians. Officers in Rialto, which has a population of about 100,000, already carry Taser weapons equipped with small video cameras that activate when the weapon is armed, and the officers have long worn digital audio recorders.

But when Mr. Farrar told his uniformed patrol officers of his plans to introduce the new, wearable video cameras, “it wasn’t the easiest sell,” he said, especially to some older officers who initially were “questioning why ‘big brother’ should see everything they do.”

He said he reminded them that civilians could use their cellphones to record interactions, “so instead of relying on somebody else’s partial picture of what occurred, why not have your own?” he asked. “In this way, you have the real one.”

Last year, Mr. Farrar used the new wearable video cameras to conduct a continuing experiment in his department, in collaboration with Barak Ariel, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge an assistant professor at Hebrew University.

Half of Rialto’s uniformed patrol officers on each week’s schedule have been randomly assigned the cameras, also made by Taser International. Whenever officers wear the cameras, they are expected to activate them when they leave the patrol car to speak with a civilian.

A convenient feature of the camera is its “pre-event video buffer,” which continuously records and holds the most recent 30 seconds of video when the camera is off. In this way, the initial activity that prompts the officer to turn on the camera is more likely to be captured automatically, too.

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often — in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren’t wearing cameras during that shift, the study found. And, lest skeptics think that the officers with cameras are selective about which encounters they record, Mr. Farrar noted that those officers who apply force while wearing a camera have always captured the incident on video.

As small as the cameras are, they seem to be noticeable to civilians, he said. “When you look at an officer,” he said, “it kind of sticks out.” Citizens have sometimes asked officers, “Hey, are you wearing a camera?” and the officers say they are, he reported.

But what about the privacy implications? Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, says: “We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the government should be watching over the population en masse.” But requiring police officers to wear video cameras is different, he says: “When it comes to the citizenry watching the government, we like that.”

Mr. Stanley says that all parties stand to benefit — the public is protected from police misconduct, and officers are protected from bogus complaints. “There are many police officers who’ve had a cloud fall over them because of an unfounded accusation of abuse,” he said. “Now police officers won’t have to worry so much about that kind of thing.”

Mr. Farrar says officers have told him of cases when citizens arrived at a Rialto police station to file a complaint and the supervisor was able to retrieve and play on the spot the video of what had transpired. “The individuals left the station with basically no other things to say and have never come back,” he said.

The A.C.L.U. does have a few concerns about possible misuse of the recordings. Mr. Stanley says civilians shouldn’t have to worry that a video will be leaked and show up on CNN. Nor would he approve of the police storing years of videos and then using them for other purposes, like trolling for crimes with which to charge civilians. He suggests policies specifying that the videos be deleted after a certain short period.

A spokesman for Taser International said it had received orders from various police departments, including those in Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City and Hartford, as well as Fort Worth, Tex.; Chesapeake, Va.; and Modesto, Calif. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the police department of BART, the transit system, has bought 210 cameras and is training its officers in their use, part of changes undertaken after a BART police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed man in 2009.

Before the cameras, “there were so many situations where it was ‘he said, she said,’ and juries tend to believe police officers over accused criminals,” Mr. Stanley says. “The technology really has the potential to level the playing field in any kind of controversy or allegation of abuse.”

Mr. Farrar recently completed a master’s degree in applied criminology and police management at the Universiity of Cambridge. (It required only six weeks a year of residency in England.) And he wrote about the video-camera experiment in his thesis.

He says his goal is to equip all uniformed officers in his department with the video cameras. “Video is very transparent,” he said. “It’s the whole enchilada.”

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Is Microsoft Making "Wearable" Xbox Controllers?

We've covered "wearable game controller" prototypes before, but every time our reaction was the same: "This doesn't look very fun, but in the hands of a capable company it definitely could be."

Well, a patent application filed by Microsoft back in July outlines "a 'Wearable Electromyography-Based Controller,' … for measuring muscle activity, to interact with and control computing devices … [including] game consoles, televisions or other multimedia devices." As the attached illustrations clarify, "wearable" could refer to everything from a pair of gloves to a shirt and pants to a simple arm-band or pair of glasses.

This could be the first "wearable gaming" development worth caring about.

Motion controls have had various gaming applications, but none of them has ever felt totally natural to non-gamers or sufficiently precise for hardcore gamers. A really good wearable, muscle activity-sensing controller could solve both those problems at once.

Wearable EMG sensors could have all kinds of real-world utility - from controlling prosthetic limbs to playing software-virtualized instruments - but what we really wanted to know is whether Microsoft's planning to use them for games.

The answer: a resounding maybe.

Whatever its purposes for the technology, Microsoft has kept it almost completely under wraps. As Patent Bolt points out, they've been "working on an advanced wearable computer system since at least 2008 without the press getting any wind of it."

It may not be realistic to hope we'll see one of these controllers in action for at least a few years, but it's no stretch to suggest Microsoft's researchers have gaming in mind, at least partially:

"Purposes include … interaction with conventional application such as … wired or wireless game controllers for interacting with game consoles or with video games operating on such consoles, control of pan-tilt-zoom cameras … etc."

Combine a fully wearable controller with Microsoft's rumored immersive display development, and put that in the hands of a capable game developer: there are some very, very cool possibilities.

How would you want to see a wearable controller put to use? Let us know in the comments.

Jon Fox is a Seattle hipster who loves polar bears and climbing trees. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.

Wearable Robots That Can Help People Walk Again

Mr. Abicca, a 17-year-old from San Diego, is essentially wearing a robot. His bionic suit consists of a pair of mechanical braces wrapped around his legs and electric muscles that do much of the work of walking. It is controlled by a computer on his back and a pair of crutches held in his arms that look like futuristic ski poles.

Since an accident involving earth-moving equipment three years ago that damaged his spinal cord, Mr. Abicca has been unable to walk on his own. The suit, made by a company called Ekso Bionics, is an effort to change that.

“It’s awesome — I love getting back up,” Mr. Abicca said before strapping on the legs during his recent visit to the company’s headquarters here. “Even just standing up straight is awesome.”

Ekso is one of several companies and research labs that are working on wearable robots made to help disabled people or to make the human body superhuman. In 2010, Raytheon released a suit for soldiers that is designed to reduce injuries from heavy lifting. And in Israel, a company called Argo Medical Technologies also makes a robotic suit to help paraplegics walk again.

Ekso says it was the first company to introduce a self-contained robotic suit, without any tethers to, say, a power supply. And though its suits for the disabled are now used only in rehabilitation centers, it is looking ahead to a day when they will let people take to the sidewalks, the shopping malls — and maybe even the woods.

Ekso, which was founded seven years ago by engineers in Berkeley, Calif., takes its name from the word exoskeleton, meaning a skeleton that is on the outside of the body. Originally financed by the military, the company collaborated with the University of California, Berkeley, and the military contractor Lockheed Martin on a device called the Hulc, which allows soldiers to carry up to 200 pounds of equipment over mixed terrain.

In February, Ekso started shipping exoskeletons that are being used in physical therapy to get people out of wheelchairs and using their lower bodies so their muscles do not deteriorate. About 15 rehabilitation centers in the United States are using the suits; they pay $140,000 for each one, along with a $10,000 annual service contract.

With a frame of aluminum and titanium, the bionic suit, called the Ekso, is battery-powered and weighs about 50 pounds. The suit is not yet at the point where a disabled person can use it independently. The batteries last three hours, at which point a physical therapist needs to replace them. Supervision also ensures that a patient does not fall over; the company said hundreds of people have walked in the suit, and none had fallen.

The Ekso suit is already going beyond just helping people walk again. The latest version released last month includes walking modes with different difficulty levels to challenge patients to make progress in their rehabilitation.

In the first mode, when a patient is first learning to walk with the suit, a physical therapist sets the step length and speed and presses a button on a computer to trigger each step. In the second mode, the patient can trigger a step with buttons on the crutches. And in the third, most advanced mode, once the patient has learned to maintain her balance in the suit, she can trigger the suit to take a step just by shifting her weight.

Patients learn to walk in the robotic suits surprisingly quickly, said Eythor Bender, chief executive of Ekso Bionics, who previously worked at Ossur, a company that made artificial limbs. “People who come in haven’t walked for years and years,” he said in an interview. “They are walking on their own in two days.”

Yoky Matsuoka, the former head of innovation at Google and now vice president for technology at Nest, which makes a smart thermostat, said the time was right for exoskeletons to graduate from science-fiction fantasy to commercial reality. Battery technology has improved significantly, materials like plastics and carbon fibers have gotten more lightweight and durable, and robotic systems have become easier to control, she said.

“In the last 10 years, the evolution of some of those materials and some technologies allows us to make robots that really stay human-safe and human-friendly,” Ms. Matsuoka said.

However, the cost of such devices for medical use could still be an obstacle, she said, because such specialized equipment sells in smaller quantities, making it difficult to bring the price down. She said that wider use by the military could help.

At some point, the Ekso suit may have to clear some regulatory hurdles. The current version of the suit is exempt from regulation, but if the company introduced one for personal use at home, it would probably have to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration, said John Tugwell, director of regulatory affairs at Ekso.

Ekso is hoping that the suits will, in the next few years, really start to go places.

Russ Angold, a founder and the chief technology officer of the company, predicted that exoskeletons, like today’s smartphones, would slim down and get more powerful and affordable, becoming part of everyday life.

“The dream at the end of the day is be able to walk into a sporting goods store, like an REI, and pick up an exoskeleton,” Mr. Angold said. “They’re like the jeans of the future.”

Bits Blog: Olympus and Apple Join Google With Wearable Computing

At left Google Glass, Olympus Meg 4.0 in the middle. At right, Apple patent for a goggle-like display. 

It seems that everyone in tech has been busy working on wearable computing and augmented reality glasses.

Last week, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, showed off augmented reality Google Glasses at the company’s Google I/O annual developer conference.

Now Olympus is pulling the curtains back on its own wearable computer glasses. In a news release, Olympus announced the “MEG 4.0 ultracompact wearable display prototype,” which it said “can be used in everyday life.” The company said that the MEG 4.0 “display does not obstruct the view of the outside world” and that the glasses only weighed 30 grams, including the battery.

The Meg 4.0 requires a Bluetooth connection to a smartphone, which is then used to share information back to the Olympus display. Pricing and a release date were not discussed in the release.

Meanwhile, Apple also seems to be working on wearable computers.

The company has filed repeated patents for displays that are embedded in goggles and glasses. This week Apple was also awarded a patent for a “Peripheral treatment for head-mounted displays” that can be used to project an image into someone’s eye.

While some companies focus on glasses as wearable computers, there is always the possibility of computerized contact lenses.

Babak Parviz, who is working at Google on the company’s glasses project, specializes in bionanotechnology, which is the fusion of tiny technologies and biology. Mr. Parviz was part of a team that built a tiny contact lens embedded with electronics.

A report issued by Forrester Research earlier this year noted that wearable computing will bring a “new platform war,” not dissimilar to the mobile app battles today, between Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, along with each company’s developer communities.

“Imagine video games that happen in real space,” the report said.  “Or glasses that remind you of your colleague’s name that you really should know. Or paying for a coffee at Starbucks with your watch instead of your phone.”

As I noted in my column in The New York Times this week, these wearable computers are the future and will finally “allow technology to get out of the way.”