Companies such as Wave and Magment offer a variety of approaches for charging vehicles without plugs while they're being stored or even used, but costs stand in the way of broader adoption.
Starting this summer, the public buses in the Oberhaching suburb of Munich, Germany, won’t have to be plugged in to charge overnight anymore. Stefan Schelle, the mayor of Oberhaching, is taking advantage of the fact that an innovative startup has its offices in his community: Magment, short for “magnetizing cement,” will install its underground charging pad in the coming months. As soon as that happens, the buses will charge while they wait at the city’s main station or while stored at their overnight quarters.
In his light-filled office, Magment’s co-founder and CEO, Mauricio Esguerra, demonstrates how the new technology works: The lights on his black model car only flash when he puts the miniature Porsche directly atop the induction plate. “This works just like when you charge your iPhone on its charging pad or heat a pot on an induction range. People don’t have to be afraid of magnetic fields or anything like that,” says the 60-year-old Colombia-born entrepreneur. “The induction only gets activated when the storage battery is placed directly on top.
Patented by Esguerra, the “magnetizing concrete” is able to target the charge quite precisely. The batteries will be mounted in a box underneath the vehicles such as the retrofitted public buses. “Look, here’s one passing by,” says Esguerra, pointing out the window as a blue city bus rides past his office.
An invention finds its purpose
Esguerra grew up in Bogotá, studied physics at the Technical University Munich where he fell in love with a German woman, and started a family in her home country. For 15 years, he developed magnetic products, including the magnetizing cement, for Siemens, Europe’s largest industrial manufacturing company. The patent belonged to Siemens, of course. “But there were hardly any electric vehicles yet,” Esguerra says, “and Siemens didn’t quite know what to do with this invention.”
Esguerra changed companies a few times but, in 2015, he got an offer from Siemens. The patent for the magnetizing cement was expiring and Siemens wasn’t interested in keeping it. Would he, as the inventor, want it back? “I did not hesitate a second,” Esguerra remembers with a smile. “I’m a magnetician at heart.” That same year, he founded Magment to finally make use of the technology he created 20 years ago.
To demonstrate how his cement is made, he opens the lid of a plastic bucket filled with cement powder. Mixed in are fingernail-sized black pieces, so-called ferrites, mainly consisting of three ceramic oxides: iron, nickel and zinc. Conventionally, they are used in electronics such as cell phones, computers and cables. Molded in concrete, ferrites create a magnetic field that can transport charge to a vehicle, potentially eliminating range anxiety for EV drivers.
Molded in concrete, ferrites create a magnetic field that can transport charge to a vehicle, potentially eliminating range anxiety for EV drivers.
Magment
“Ferrites have extremely high rejection rates,” Esguerra adds. “It’s comparable to other ceramics: As soon as there is a small tear or crack, the material is rejected. We are talking about a rejection pile of 500,000 tons per year worldwide. There are mountains of unused materials.”
Exactly this fact was the starting point of his research at Siemens: “What can we do with this energy-intensive material? Back then, it was crushed up and mixed into the cement for building streets, without adding any function.” Today, too, the Magment material can simply be mixed with the conventional material and equipment of the cement industry. “We take advantage of the fact that we don’t have to build factories and don’t have high transportation costs."
In addition to saving resources, recycled ferrite also makes concrete more durable.
No plugs, no charging breaks
A young intern in the office next door winds cables around a new coil. These coils will later be lowered underground in a box, connected to the grid and encased in magnetizing concrete. The recipient box looks similar; it’s another coil but smaller, and it will be mounted underneath the carriage of the vehicle. For a car, the battery box would be 25 by 25 centimeters (about 10 inches), for a scooter five by five centimeters (about two inches).
Esguerra pushes an electric scooter into a cemented scooter rack next to his office. The charging pad is invisible. A faint beep is the only sign that it has started charging. “Childs play!” Esguerra says. “Even when someone puts in the scooter a little crooked, the charge still works. Our efficiency rate is up to 96 percent.” From this summer on, hotel chains in Munich will try out this system with their rental scooters, at a price of about 500 Euros per charging station.
Compared to plug-in charging, Magment’s benefits include smaller batteries that charge slower and, therefore, gentler, so they may last longer. Nobody needs to plug in the vehicles manually anymore. “Personally, I’ve had an EV for six years,” Esguerra says, “and how often does it happen that I forgot to plug it in overnight and then start out with a low charge in the morning? Once people get used to the invisible charging system, it will become the norm.“
There are also downsides: Most car companies aren’t ready for the new technology. Hyundai is the first carmaker that announced plans to equip some new models with inductive charging capability. “How many cars are electrified worldwide?” Esguerra asks and gives the answer himself: “One percent. And how many forklifts are electrified? More than 70 percent!” Therefore, Magment focuses on charging forklifts, e-scooters and buses.
Magment has focused most of its efforts on charging forklifts and other vehicle types that are entirely or predominantly electric, unlike cars.
Magment
On the morning of my visit to Esguerra’s office, a developer of the world’s third-biggest forklift manufacturer is there to inspect how the technology works on the ground. In the basement, a Magment engineer drives an electric forklift over a testbed with invisible charging coils, turning on the green charging light. Esguerra opens the interior of the forklift and points out the two batteries. “With our system, the forklift will only need one battery.” The savings, about 7,000 Euro per forklift, will pay for the installation of Magment’s charging system in warehouses, Esguerra calculates. “Less personnel and no unnecessary wait times for charging will lead to further savings,” he says.
To implement the new technology as efficiently as possible, Magment engineers began recording the transport routes of forklifts in warehouses. “It looks like spaghetti diagrams,” Esguerra explains. “Soon you get the areas where the forklifts pass or wait most frequently. This is where you install the chargers underground.” The forklifts will charge while in use, without having to pause for charging breaks. The method could also work for robots, for instance, in warehouses and distribution centers.
Roads of the future could be electric
Potential disadvantages might become apparent once the technology is more broadly in use. Therefore investors were initially reluctant, Esguerra admits. “Some are eager to be the first but most prefer to wait until the technology has been extensively used in real life.”
A clear hurdle today is that electrifying entire freeways with induction coils would cost at least 1 to 1.5 million Euros per kilometer. The German Department for Transportation even calculates overall costs of 14 to 47 million Euros per kilometer. So, the technology may only make sense for areas where vehicles pass or dwell the longest, like the Oberhaching train station or a busy interstate toll booth.
And yet, Magment is ramping up to compete with other companies that build larger inductive charging pads. The company just finished the first 20 meters of a testbed in Indiana, in partnership with the Purdue University and the Indiana Department of Transportation. Magment is poised to build “the world’s first contactless wireless-charging concrete pavement highway segment,” Purdue University announced.
The project, part of Purdue’s ASPIRE (Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification) program, is financed by the National Science Foundation. “Indiana is known as the Crossroads of America, and we’re committed to fortifying our position as a transportation leader by innovating to support the emerging vehicle technology,” Governor Eric J. Holcomb said. If testing is successful, including the concrete’s capacity to charge heavy trucks operating at higher power (200 kilowatts and above), Indiana plans to identify a highway segment to install Magment’s charging pads. The earliest would be 2023 at best.
In the meantime, buses in the Californian Antelope Valley, trams at Hollywood's Universal Studios and transit buses in Tampa, Florida, are already charging with inductive technology developed by Wave, a company spun out of Utah State University. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced plans to build a test route for vehicles to charge while driving, in collaboration with the Israel-based company Electreon, and this year contracted to build the first road-based charging system in the U.S. The state is providing support through an innovative grant program.
Costs remain one of the biggest obstacles, but Esguerra’s vision includes the potential that toll roads could charge a premium for inductive charging capabilities. “And in reverse, a driver who has too much energy could feed his surplus into the grid while driving,” Esguerra dreams.
Meanwhile, Wave’s upcoming big projects are moving trucks along a route in Southern California and running a UPS route between Seattle and Portland. Wave CTO Michael Masquelier describes the inductive power transfer his company champions as “similar to a tuning fork. By vibrating that fork, you sent energy through the air and it is received by another tuning fork across the room. So it’s similar to that, but it’s magnetic energy versus sound energy.”
He hopes to partner with Magment, saying that “the magnetizing cement makes installation easier and improves the energy efficiency.” More research is needed to evaluate which company’s technology will prove to be the most efficient, practical, and cost-effective.
Esguerra’s vision includes the potential that toll roads could charge a premium for inductive charging capabilities. “And in reverse, a driver who has too much energy could feed his surplus into the grid while driving,” Esguerra dreams.
The future will soon arrive in the idyllic town of Bad Staffelstein, a quaint tourist destination in the Upper Franconia region of Germany. Visitors will be taken to and from the main station and the popular thermal bath by driverless shuttles. Together with the University of Wuppertal, the regional government of Upper Franconia wants to turn its district into “the center of autonomous driving.” Magment is about to install inductive charging pads at the shuttle stations and the thermal bath, eliminating the need for the shuttles to stop for charging times. No more drivers, no cable, no range anxiety. Masquelier believes that “wireless and autonomous driving go hand in hand.” Science fiction? It will become science reality in spring 2023.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story erroneously mentioned that Electreon required overhead cables.
In an initial study, Canary analyzed speech recordings with AI and identified early stage Alzheimer’s with 96 percent accuracy.
Arnold was diagnosed sooner than many others. It's important to find out early, when interventions can make the most difference. One promising avenue is looking at how people talk. Research has shown that Alzheimer’s affects a part of the brain that controls speech, resulting in small changes before people show other signs of the disease.
Now, Canary Speech, a company based in Utah, is using AI to examine elements like the pitch of a person’s voice and their pauses. In an initial study, Canary analyzed speech recordings with AI and identified early stage Alzheimer’s with 96 percent accuracy.
Developing the AI model
Canary Speech’s CEO, Henry O’Connell, met cofounder Jeff Adams about 40 years before they started the company. Back when they first crossed paths, they were both living in Bethesda, Maryland; O’Connell was a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health studying rare neurological diseases, while Adams was working to decode spy messages. Later on, Adams would specialize in building mathematical models to analyze speech and sound as a team leader in developing Amazon's Alexa.
It wasn't until 2015 that they decided to make use of the fit between their backgrounds. ““We established Canary Speech in 2017 to build a product that could be used in multiple languages in clinical environments,” O'Connell says.
The need is growing. About 55 million people worldwide currently live with Alzheimer’s, a number that is expected to double by 2050. Some scientists think the disease results from a buildup of plaque in the brain. It causes mild memory loss at first and, over time, this issue get worse while other symptoms, such as disorientation and hallucinations, can develop. Treatment to manage the disease is more effective in the earlier stages, but detection is difficult since mild symptoms are often attributed to the normal aging process.
O’Connell and Adams specialize in the complex ways that Alzheimer’s effects how people speak. Using AI, their mathematical model analyzes 15 million data points every minute, focusing on certain features of speech such as pitch, pauses and elongation of words. It also pays attention to how the vibrations of vocal cords change in different stages of the disease.
To create their model, the team used a type of machine learning called deep neural nets, which looks at multiple layers of data - in this case, the multiple features of a person’s speech patterns.
“Deep neural nets allow us to look at much, much larger data sets built out of millions of elements,” O’Connell explained. “Through machine learning and AI, we’ve identified features that are very sensitive to an Alzheimer’s patient versus [people without the disease] and also very sensitive to mild cognitive impairment, early stage and moderate Alzheimer's.” Based on their learnings, Canary is able to classify the disease stage very quickly, O’Connell said.
“When we’re listening to sublanguage elements, we’re really analyzing the direct result of changes in the brain in the physical body,” O’Connell said. “The brain controls your vocal cords: how fast they vibrate, the expansion of them, the contraction.” These factors, along with where people put their tongues when talking, function subconsciously and result in subtle changes in the sounds of speech.
Further testing is needed
In an initial trial, Canary analyzed speech recordings from phone calls to a large U.S. health insurer. They looked at the audio recordings of 651 policyholders who had early stage Alzheimer’s and 1018 who did not have the condition, aiming for a representative sample of age, gender and race. They used this data to create their first diagnostic model and found that it was 96 percent accurate in identifying Alzheimer’s.
Christian Herff, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, praised this approach while adding that further testing is needed to assess its effectiveness.
“I think the general idea of identifying increased risk for cognitive impairment based on speech characteristics is very feasible, particularly when change in a user’s voice is monitored, for example, by recording speech every year,” Herff said. He noted that this can only be a first indication, not a full diagnosis. The accuracy still needs to be validated in studies that follows individuals over a period of time, he said.
Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, also thinks Canary’s tool has potential but highlights that Canary could diagnose some people who don’t really have the disease. “This is an interesting and promising application of AI,” he said, “but these tools need to be used carefully. Imagine the anxiety of being misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”
As with many other AI tools, privacy and bias are additional issues to monitor closely, Walsh said.
Other languages
A related issue is that not everyone is fluent in English. Mahnaz Arvaneh, a senior lecturer in automatic control and systems engineering at the University of Sheffield, said this could be a blind spot.
“The system may not be very accurate for those who have English as their second language as their speaking patterns would be different, and any issue might be because of language deficiency rather than cognitive issues,” Arvaneh said.
The team is expanding to multiple languages starting with Japanese and Spanish. The elements of the model that make up the algorithm are very similar, but they need to be validated and retrained in a different language, which will require access to more data.
Recently, Canary analyzed the phone calls of 233 Japanese patients who had mild cognitive impairment and 704 healthy people. Using an English model they were able to identify the Japanese patients who had mild cognitive impairment with 78 percent accuracy. They also developed a model in Japanese that was 45 percent accurate, and they’re continuing to train it with more data.
The future
Canary is using their model to look at other diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s. They’re also collaborating with pharmaceuticals to validate potential therapies for Alzheimer’s. By looking at speech patterns over time, Canary can get an indication of how well these drugs are working.
Dave Arnold and his wife dance at his nephew’s wedding in Rochester, New York, ten years ago, before his Alzheimer's diagnosis.
Dave Arnold
Ultimately, they want to integrate their tool into everyday life. “We want it to be used in a smartphone, or a teleconference call so that individuals could be examined in their home,” O’Connell said. “We could follow them over time and work with clinical teams and hospitals to improve the evaluation of patients and contribute towards an accurate diagnosis.”
Arnold, the patient with early stage Alzheimer’s, sees great promise. “The process of getting a diagnosis is already filled with so much anxiety,” he said. “Anything that can be done to make it easier and less stressful would be a good thing, as long as it’s proven accurate.”
Doctors used new eye drops to treat a rare genetic disorder.
The gene therapy: In May 2023, the FDA approved Vyjuvek, the first gene therapy to treat DEB.
Vyjuvek uses an inactivated herpes simplex virus to deliver working copies of the gene for collagen 7 to the body’s cells. In small trials, 65 percent of DEB-caused wounds sprinkled with it healed completely, compared to just 26 percent of wounds treated with a placebo.
“It was like looking through thick fog.” -- Antonio Vento Carvajal.
The patient: Antonio Vento Carvajal, a 14 year old living in Florida, was one of the trial participants to benefit from Vyjuvek, which was developed by Pittsburgh-based pharmaceutical company Krystal Biotech.
While the topical gene therapy could help his skin, though, it couldn’t do anything to address the severe vision loss Antonio experienced due to his DEB. He’d undergone multiple surgeries to have scar tissue removed from his eyes, but due to his condition, the blisters keep coming back.
“It was like looking through thick fog,” said Antonio, noting how his impaired vision made it hard for him to play his favorite video games. “I had to stand up from my chair, walk over, and get closer to the screen to be able to see.”
The idea: Encouraged by how Antonio’s skin wounds were responding to the gene therapy, Alfonso Sabater, his doctor at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, reached out to Krystal Biotech to see if they thought an alternative formula could potentially help treat his patient’s eyes.
The company was eager to help, according to Sabater, and after about two years of safety and efficacy testing, he had permission, under the FDA’s compassionate use protocol, to treat Antonio’s eyes with a version of the topical gene therapy delivered as eye drops.
The results: In August 2022, Sabater once again removed scar tissue from Antonio’s right eye, but this time, he followed up the surgery by immediately applying eye drops containing the gene therapy.
“I would send this message to other families in similar situations, whether it’s DEB or another condition that can benefit from genetic therapy. Don’t be afraid.” -- Yunielkys “Yuni” Carvajal.
The vision in Antonio’s eye steadily improved. By about eight months after the treatment, it was just slightly below average (20/25) and stayed that way. In March 2023, Sabater performed the same procedure on his young patient’s other eye, and the vision in it has also steadily improved.
“I’ve seen the transformation in Antonio’s life,” said Sabater. “He’s always been a happy kid. Now he’s very happy. He can function pretty much normally. He can read, he can study, he can play video games.”
Looking ahead: The topical gene therapy isn’t a permanent fix — it doesn’t alter Antonio’s own genes, so he has to have the eye drops reapplied every month. Still, that’s far less invasive than having to undergo repeated surgeries.
Sabater is now working with Krystal Biotech to launch trials of the eye drops in other patients, and not just those with DEB. By changing the gene delivered by the therapy, he believes it could be used to treat other eye disorders that are far more common — Fuchs’ dystrophy, for example, affects the vision of an estimated 300 million people over the age of 30.
Antonio’s mother, Yunielkys “Yuni” Carvajal, meanwhile, has said that having her son be the first to receive the eye drops was “very scary,” but she’s hopeful others will take a chance on new gene therapies if given the opportunity.
“I would send this message to other families in similar situations, whether it’s DEB or another condition that can benefit from genetic therapy,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”
This article originally appeared on Freethink, home of the brightest minds and biggest ideas of all time.
