The New Age, Micro Robotics

Most of us dread an experience at the hospital. The medics often use invasive methods that cause us pain and discomfort. Sometimes the method involves a lengthy meticulate process, usually a surgery, which is both costly and takes a long time to heal. What if we could go to the hospital, swallow a tiny device that gets into living tissue and the doctor would control it to carry out a procedure? Not imaginable? It shouldn’t be. It can be done with a small enough for injection without leaving a wound, new microrobots could revolutionize the way modern medicine treats certain hard-to-reach areas of the body. The eyes and brain are extremely tricky places for surgeons, and a non-invasive solution to certain ailments has long been sought. Micro robotics or microbots is the field of miniature robotics, in particular mobile robots with characteristic dimensions less than 1 mm.

Due to their small size, microbots are potentially very cheap, and could be used in large numbers to explore environments which are too small or too dangerous for people or larger robots. It is expected that microbots will be useful in applications such as looking for survivors in collapsed buildings after an earthquake, or crawling through the digestive tract. What microbots lack in computational power, they can make up for by using large numbers, as in swarms of microbots. The development of wireless connections, especially Wi-Fi has greatly increased the communication capacity of microbots, and consequently their ability to coordinate with other microbots to carry out more complex tasks. Magnetic Microbots are already in use for various operations, such as removing plaque from a patient's arteries or helping with ocular conditions and disease screenings.

Another application of the micro robotics is in space exploration. They can be used for planetary exploration, making them next-generation instruments for in-situ chemical and mineralogical analyses on extra-terrestrial planets. It's easy to imagine relatively lightweight micro-robots routinely probing the entire solar system. The challenge of building space-borne robots is in making significant decisions on their own. Radio signals can take hours to reach distant parts of the solar system thus remote control from the earth is not effective. This filed of microbots is still significantly in the research stage and wide deployment is not expected.

Microbots can be flexible and deformable to enable them to work in uncertain and dynamic environments. Researchers are working on various materials that our bodies can tolerate and would respond positively to body fluids. Stimuli-responsive hydrogels are a class of materials closely resembling biological tissues in their physical and chemical properties. These materials have unique capability to responds to different stimuli such as temperature, pH and ionic strength. They can be used in tissue engineering, drug and cell delivery and wound healing. They detect lesions, deliver medicine directly to affected areas, and remove tissue samples for further study.

One of the major challenges in developing a microrobot is to achieve motion using a very limited power supply. The microrobots can use a small lightweight battery source like a coin cell or can scavenge power from the surrounding environment in the form of vibration or light energy. Microbots are also now using biological motors as power sources, such as flagellated Serratia marcescens, to draw chemical power from the surrounding fluid to actuate the robotic device. These microbots can be directly controlled by stimuli such as chemotaxis or galvanotaxis with several control schemes available.Another challenge, once introduced into the body, they must be able to move through bodily fluids and tissue. Magnetic control is used in some cases but limits the areas microbots can explore. They have limits on motor power, motion precision, and energetic efficiency of modules making them less relevant. Despite these challenges, microbots have a great future. Some scientists predict that micro robotics will define the new age after the Internet.

Africa Goes For International Airtime Remittance

During the East Africa Com Conference at Safari Park on 9^th and 10^th September 2014, one thing caught my eye- International Airtime Remittance. The statistics involved are just mind boggling. For instance, in general, there are over 200 million foreigners in diaspora sending approximately 400 billion dollars to their home countries in cash. According to the Central Bank of Kenya, Kenyans remitted around 1.29 billion dollars in 2013 alone, which translates to 114 billion Kenya Shillings in cash. However, sending cash has hitherto been expensive. An alternative to remitting cash is to remit mobile air time instead. Mobile airtime is considered an electronic product, rather than cash, by most regulatory authorities, and is therefore easy to manage. Many people in diaspora now choose to use air time remittance as a gift for friends and family in their home country; a little bonus on top of a weekly cash remittances, or something to encourage the family member to phone. It is cheaper and allows them to send money is small denominations. 

A study by Juniper Research indicated that international transfers made via mobile phone top up exceeded $10 billion in 2013. In the developing world, there are 2.7 billion people who do not have a bank account. At this same time, there are 1 billion people who have cell phones in these areas. The overlap of these numbers is substantial. In Kenya, mobile penetration is at 78% while the banking is at 40% of the population. Many people without bank accounts have cell service. For those in developing countries, buying airtime for them could really make a difference. By having someone complete an airtime purchase on their behalf, individuals with a cell phone and no bank account can continue to stay in touch. This has propelled the growth of International airtime remittance.

How does it work? International Airtime Remittance can be implemented using a number of channels available to users, including web portals, SMS, USSD, Mobile Web Apps and Android Apps that can be fully customized. The solution requires a trans-global entity, providing a platform to integrate with mobile operator top up systems in different countries. The International Top-up Operator purchases airtime from international mobile operators at a wholesale or discounted rate. By offering international top up, retail channels can enable their customers to conveniently purchase airtime and send. Retail distribution channels purchase airtime from the international top-up operator, and sell airtime to customers for a service fee added to the top-up amount at the time of sale.

The future of International remittances is bright, with operators looking to offer consumers ability to seamlessly send value across virtually any border to any recipient without traditional intermediaries. For instance, paying electricity bills, dental bills, or school tuition with the same ease as sending of airtime from a prepaid mobile phone. Over the last few years, Kenya Power and Lighting Company has been rolling out prepaid meters for urban households and has installed approximately 400,000 meters. Instead of the postpaid meter, you’ve got a prepaid meter and as soon as there is no money left in the meter, the light goes out. Once this happens, the consumer buys prepaid tokens to resume the service. What if a relative living in the diaspora to top up your prepaid electricity meter to ensure that your lights never go off?

Another example of a prepaid utility service is the M-Kopa Solar. The solar lighting system offers clean lighting solutions to millions of homes that are not on the electricity grid. M-Kopa provides pay as-you-go solar home solution and comes with two LED solar lights and one solar rechargeable LED torch, and a larger 8W panel that gives 60 percent more charging capacity. Following the removal of VAT on solar-powered devices, M-KOPA Solar charges an initial deposit of KES 2,999 followed by 365 daily payments of KES 40. The growth of this service has been tremendous. M-Kopa is currently connecting 2,000 homes to solar every week, with a customer base of around 90,000 and targeting 1 Million customers in the next four years. Most of the M-Kopa customers are in the rural areas, some have relatives in the diaspora. Considering it only costs $0.40 per month to use the solar solution, most people in the diaspora would be more than happy to support their families back at home. There are many existing and upcoming pre-paid utilities that may use International remittances in the near future.

Farewell CDMA

In July 2007, Telkom Kenya took the market by surprise when they launched a wireless product based on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). The competitors at the time, Safaricom and Celtel, felt short changed. The Telkom Wireless product did not attract excise duty like their counterpart GSM products from the competition, meaning the cost to the consumer was lower. Moreover, Telkom Kenya did not have to pay for the mobile service license since the product was based on license to provide fixed wireless service with a region such as a province. Apart from voice, the company could now deliver data to any part of the country. By far, the company had a great advantage and the strategy was brilliant.

Fast forward to 2015, Telkom Kenya, now Orange, has halted the CDMA operations due to lack of advancement of the technology and its unviability in the market. According to the Communications Authority of Kenya report Quarter 2 2014/2015, the number of subscribers on CDMA has continued with a declining trend to 132,017.  Comparing this to the total number of GSM mobile subscribers by all operators standing at 32,768,828, there is a significant difference. So, what happened? Why couldn’t such a great advantage lead to astronomical number of subscribers on CDMA? The scenario in Kenya depicts the battle of the CDMA and GSM technologies as witnessed in other parts of the world, GSM is dominant with approximately more than 70% of the global market share. 

 

CDMA is neither a viable nor competitive and has lagged behind as GSM advanced to 4G (LTE) at 100Mbps and now the yet to be standardized 5G. 3G CDMA networks, known as Evolution Data Optimized (EV-DO) is stuck at 3.6Mbps. The major difference between GSM and CDMA is the way subscriber information is stored. For GSM, the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card stores all the information on the mobile device. This means that subscribers can migrate from one GSM provider to another easily, as long as the mobile device is not locked to a particular provider, most aren’t. With number portability, consumers can now maintain their phone numbers as they migrate. On the other hand, CDMA operators usually store subscriber information including phone book and scheduler information, on the operator’s database. CDMA phones are more or less locked to one provider. In Kenya, there was only one CDMA provider thus there was no provider to migrate to. 
 

Another essential difference is that, generally, CDMA can't make voice calls and transmit data at the same time. The user will either use data or make calls; there are instances when this affects the quality of service. Its rival, GSM, has capability to handle voice and data simultaneously on 3G. The user can browser while making calls simultaneously hence an improved customer experience. The area which GSM takes itself from its competition with CDMA is in International roaming. Most mobile providers in the world are on GSM technology. Availability of quad-band handsets makes it convenient for business travelers to move from one country to another while they mobile devices adapt to the available GSM frequencies dynamically and offer roaming service. CDMA does not have this edge, only few select countries have CDMA while the frequency range is limited.  
 

The ripple effect of the advantages of GSM over CDMA above is that most manufactures prefer to make GSM mobile devices and most providers venture into GSM research and deployment. CDMA has a bleak future with more subscribers moving to GSM and some of the global operators such as Verizon planning to move to LTE. The future seems to be in LTE. The Long Term Evolution (LTE), a new generation of mobile network technology, promises to revolutionize the use of voice and data services. LTE gained significant momentum as the dominant next-generation mobile access technology throughout 2008. Commercial LTE launches will initially appear on a small scale in Japan, the U.S. and Sweden in 2010, with larger players in Western Europe following in 2011 to 2012. The technology landed in Kenya in 2015 and soon all providers in the country might have this technology. In the end, the consumer is the main beneficiary with most bandwidth at a lower cost and better customer experience.