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Our skin is our largest organ. A gateway between our brain and the rest of the world.
Imagine then a scene where skin could communicate what’s going on inside a human body. It could inform surgeons, provide alerts when our body is about to fall ill, or even diagnose diseases inside another human being, simply through the sense of touch.
University of Tokyo scientist Takao Someya is making that scene a reality.
Fun stuff.
Johnny Matheny’s handshake is friendly, confident and firm — though not in the bone-crushing manner favoured by some of the alpha types here in the Pentagon.
What is remarkable is that Matheny’s proffered hand is not actually his. It is part of a robotic prosthesis researchers hope one day could help transform the lives of countless amputees.
“In the beginning, you had to think pretty hard about individual movements,” Matheny said as he demonstrated his mastery of the black metallic limb, clenching the fist and swiveling his wrist in a natural-looking motion.
Expansion of BMI and Bionics has now come to Purdue University.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) — Researchers at Purdue have been working on technology that will help pave the way for the future people who use artificial limbs.
“The point of these research labs is to discover new technologies that we can translate into the real world and make the world a better place,” Purdue Center for Implantable Devices Director Pedro Irazoqui said.
Bionic limbs are artificial limbs which use signals sent from the brain, nerves and muscles to operate as the user wishes — just like real limbs work.
Not only Google; there is Huawei and their AR contacts and Samsung are also making AR Contacts. And, the news 3 weeks ago shows that Samsung has applied for their own patent.
Google has filed a patent for what sounds like a bionic eye.
A patent filed in 2014 and published Thursday describes a device that could correct vision without putting contacts in or wearing glasses everyday.
But to insert the device, a person must undergo what sounds like a rather intrusive procedure.
More broadly, there’s a paradox in all this, that reflects the overarching direction of contemporary robotics. As machines become more and more general-purpose, they’re also going to become much better at tailoring their behavior to different kinds of people—and even eventually to different individuals. Already, SoftBank’s Pepper robot, a humanoid designed to interactive with people, is billed as the first machine able to read human emotions. For people to accept robots as they increasingly work their way into various areas of our lives, robots will have to develop fairly sophisticated understanding of individual human needs.
“If an assistive robot tries to help you, how much help you want really depends on your personality and the situation,” Dragan says. That’s also why robots are in some cases changing form—some of the machines designed to care for humans, for example, will have soft, cuddly bodies rather than just hard metal exoskeletons.
“We’re going to have more and more capable robots,” Dragan told me. Which means when machines interact with people, we’ll be able to customize them depending on who’s around; or if humans are around at all.
BMI/ BCs are only going to improve over time and give new lives and chances again to people. Note: this version has limited use outside the medical lab; however, they are working on making one wireless and connected in order to be used anywhere.
Thanks to an experimental treatment that included implanting a chip in his brain, Ian Burkhart was able to regain control of his hand.
Burkhart broke his neck five years ago when he hit the ocean floor while diving off of the coast in North Carolina. The accident left him paralyzed from the chest down with limited movement in his arms and hands, but no feeling in them. On Wednesday, doctors announced Burkhart is able to control his hand using a computer that reads his thoughts and transmits the instructions to the nerves in his hand, bypassing the neck injury.
In 2014, doctors implanted a chip the size of an eraser head in Burkhart’s brain, after he told them he was willing to participate. Burkhart’s father was somewhat hesitant to see his son undergo open brain surgery unnecessarily, but eventually came around to the idea.
