CUHK start-ups eye silver economy's need for ‘wearable robotics'
Established last year, RT HealthTech has developed several soft inflatable joint support products. It plans to start selling them in two months, targeting
elderly people with weaker joints and those with minor injuries who want to keep exercising to maintain muscle strength.
They feature a rechargeable battery-powered mobile air-pumping system that can generate adjustable levels of force, said co-founder Raymond Tong Kai-yu in an interview earlier this month.
'The devices can keep knee and elbow joints in position, while providing an extra pair of 'artificial muscles' to reduce joint impact during physical activities,' said Tong, a professor and founding chairman of the university's Department of Biomedical Engineering. 'We are addressing the needs of the fast-growing silver economy.'
The proportion of Hong Kong people aged 65 and over was projected to rise to 36 per cent in 2046 from 22.4 per cent in 2023, according to government projections.
RT HealthTech was seeking to sell 1,000 units in the first three months at around HK$1,200 (US$153) each, Tong said. It planned to appoint a separate distributor for mainland China.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
31 minutes ago
- South China Morning Post
BYD outsells Tesla in Hong Kong EV market as mainland firms eye global expansion
BYD scored the most new electric vehicle (EV) registrations in Hong Kong in the first half of 2025, beating Tesla and BMW , as mainland Chinese carmakers increased their focus on the city to serve as a launch pad for their global ambitions. The Shenzhen-based carmaker accounted for 27 per cent, or 4,902, of the 18,356 private EVs that were registered in the first half, data from the city's Transport Department showed this week. BYD's bestseller with 3,676 units was the Sealion 07, a pure electric, mid-size, five-seat SUV that went on sale at the end of 2024. Over the same time period, 3,889 Teslas were registered. Geely-owned Zeekr, Toyota, and mainland EV maker Xpeng rounded out the top six in the first half. Together, the top six brands accounted for 66 per cent of all EV registrations, the data showed. In 2024, 9,556 Teslas were newly registered, nearly doubling BYD's EV sales tally, the government said. But mainland EV makers have become more ambitious in the city as they faced fierce competition at home and struggled with barriers to entering key overseas markets like the US and the European Union. 'Although foreign carmakers such as Tesla and BMW hold established brand advantages, Chinese EV brands like BYD and Geely are rapidly gaining favour among Hong Kong consumers, thanks to their advanced technologies, appealing features, and competitive pricing,' said David Zhang, secretary general of the International Intelligent Vehicle Engineering Association, which has offices in Hong Kong and Guangdong province.
South China Morning Post
31 minutes ago
- South China Morning Post
Alibaba upgrades flagship Qwen3 model to outperform OpenAI, DeepSeek in maths, coding
Alibaba Group Holding unveiled an upgraded version of its third-generation Qwen3 family of large language models (LLMs), improving one of its members to score higher in maths and coding than products from rivals OpenAI and DeepSeek. The new Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507-FP8 is an open-source model that achieved 'significant improvements in general capabilities, including instruction following, logical reasoning, text comprehension, mathematics, science, coding and tool usage', according to a Tuesday update on artificial intelligence (AI) community HuggingFace and ModelScope, Alibaba's open-source platform. Alibaba owns the Post. It outperformed some rivals in certain assessments, such as the 2025 American Invitational Mathematics Examination, where the new Alibaba model scored 70.3. By comparison, DeepSeek-V3-0324, the most recent version of the foundational model that was released in March, scored 46.6 while OpenAI's GPT-4o-0327 scored 26.7. As for coding capabilities, the new Qwen secured 87.9 points from the MultiPL-E benchmark, slightly higher than 82.2 and 82.7 from the DeepSeek and OpenAI models above, respectively, though it lagged behind Claude Opus 4 Non-thinking, from Anthropic, which scored 88.5. Alibaba's new release was an upgrade from the Qwen3-235B-A22B-FP8. But it only supports non-thinking mode, where an AI system provides a direct output without the explicit reasoning steps or chain of thought that a thinking model might employ. As a result, its content length was boosted eightfold to 256,000 tokens, making it able to handle longer texts in a single conversation. Also on Tuesday, Alibaba said a Qwen model with 3 billion parameters would be integrated into HP's smart assistant 'Xiaowei Hui' on its personal computers in China, enhancing capabilities including drafting documents and summarising meetings.
South China Morning Post
2 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
China stages drone and counter-drone warfare demonstration
China has staged a drone and counter-drone warfare demonstration with a full-spectrum of unmanned systems in a move underscoring its role as a leading global drone supplier, state media reported on July 21, 2025. The exercise simulated an operation on 'seizure and control of critical border locations' in a testing ground in Inner Mongolia. Many domestically made systems were deployed in live operations across six phases of the futuristic battlefield scenario: reconnaissance, AI planning, infiltration, aerial attack, elimination, and anti-access, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Those taken to the sky included intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) UAVs, long- and short-range loitering munitions, unmanned helicopters, as well as tactical FPV drones. Ground equipment like smart command and control systems and air defence systems against drones made their show, too.
