Battery life and recharging time are currently the limiting factors on portable computing. Wired recently posted a story about A123 Systems, which is producing a supercharged/superchargeable Li-Ion battery, that may fix that problem. This has big implications for health IT and biomedical research informatics.
Link: Wired 14.03: START: Super Battery. Quote from the article:
Cofounder Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials science professor, succeeded in shrinking to nanoscale the particles that coat the battery's electrodes and store and discharge energy. The results are electrifying: Power density doubles, peak energy jumps fivefold (the cells pack more punch than a standard 110-volt wall outlet), and recharging time plummets. Going nano also solves a safety problem. Regular high-capacity Li-ion batteries tend to explode under severe stress, like if they're dropped from a ladder.
Delivering access to information to the point of care and the researcher/subject interface is difficult, but the payoffs are big. The February issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia ran an article about how mobile telephones can improve patient care that emipirically measured these benefits. Likewise, unobtrusive communication devices that can go anywhere the patient goes could take us to a new level in in situ care and research.
There has been a lot of buzz about carbon nanotubes as the next big thing in battery power. Li-Ion battery technology is well-understood, and this new advance is an evolutionary step in its technology life cycle. Good work, A123 systems!
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