The U.S. military sees value in the technology improving mission efficiency through real-time monitoring of combat soldier health status.
“Profusa’s vision is to replace a point-in-time chemistry panel that measures multiple biomarkers, such as oxygen, glucose, lactate, urea, and ions with a biosensor that provides a continuous stream of wireless data,” Ben Hwang, PhD, Profusa’s chairman and CEO, said in a news release.
2016 has been called the year that virtual reality becomes a reality, as some of the most anticipated devices will be made available on the consumer market. From Magic Leap (valued at over $1 billion) to Oculus (acquired by Facebook last year for $2 billion), there’s plenty of interest in the market, and ample room for it.
Though virtual reality is often depicted as an experience for the recliner or gaming chair, a number of VR enthusiasts want us to rethink how we engage with the technology. Instead of sitting around, they’d like to get us moving and looking beyond the go-to medium of gaming. Developers of these new devices consider fields like military training and healthcare as valuable places for mobile virtual reality to be applied.
Leading this approach is a Kickstarter VR company called Virtuix, whose treadmill-like device Omni encourages users to get upright and active. The reason to develop such a device felt like a natural evolution to Virtuix’s former Product Manager, Colton Jacobs.
“If I am walking in the virtual world my avatar is actually walking…”, he says, “…then the body’s natural reaction is, I want to stand up, I want to be walking with this avatar as if I’m actually there.”
Virtuix’s Omni
Users first slip on a pair of Omni’s $60 slippery-bottomed shoes before stripping into a lower body harness, which allows them to shuffle and slide their feet over the surface of the device. The device looks like a treadmill, but the track doesn’t actually move; rather, the shuffling and sliding motions register on the track and translate into the VR program being used. Shuffle forward, and your character moves forward. Shuffle backward, and your character back pedals. The resulting movement is somewhat awkward looking from the outside, but a reportedly smooth and consistent experience for the user.
Engadget had a chance to try out the device earlier this year and gave a positive review: “Even the easy mode that I tried, wherein you fire where you look rather than where the gun is pointing – had my heart pounding.” Testing games like Doom and Call of Duty, Engadget reporter Andrew Tarantola recounts his experience:
“The generic ‘base defense’ shooter game that I tried blew me away. Having to actually move, turn, look around and aim was incredibly immersive and added a completely new level of gameplay. There’s no more sprint button. If you want to run faster, then you really have to run faster. I was sweating by the end of my session — and grinning harder than I have in years.”
Meanwhile, Jacobs describes Omni as an immersive experience like few others. Where your standard, handheld controls allow you to manipulate your character’s movement by toggling a joystick, Omni facilitates movement by mimicking the user’s movement.
“You can walk, run, jump, turn around 360 degrees and act out your virtual avatar’s motions. We’re doing motion tracking ourselves to the lower body so we’re going to be able to tell what direction you’re walking in and how fast you’re moving, jumping, side stepping, things like that and translate that into analog movement in the virtual world.”
Though he acknowledges gaming as the default medium for immersive VR devices, Jacobs envisions Omni’s technology applied beyond gaming.
“The gaming market is a great first adopter market for us,” he says. “That being said, we’ve had multiple orders for military installations, West Point Navy installations, where they’re doing training simulation for some emergency and disaster training… instead of sending soldiers out to the field, they can actually just do training for various types of scenarios in the virtual world together.”
By getting soldiers to actually act out the movement, they’re able to simulate the physicality of real-world scenarios more realistically than can be done with a hand-held controller.
Virtuix likely won’t stop with entertainment and military training. According to Jacobs, the company has looked into healthcare — particularly physical therapy and recovery – as a field that would greatly benefit from a device like Omni.
“We’ve had multiple universities around the world actually, go ahead and order the Omni and they’re looking to test it for various different rehabilitation, also research. Stroke survivors is one of our big ones. A traditional treadmill can get someone up and walking in a straight line but a lot of the dangers that they have when they’re walking around in their home or just walking in general is when they have to turn corners. When they have to go around an object, that’s when they have a higher fall risk. Our system could potentially help to reactivate those muscles after a major neurological attack like a stroke or Alzheimer’s.”
Though virtual reality is already used in healthcare, some ask why there isn’t hasn’t been more innovation in this area by the virtual reality industry. Perhaps Omni could be a useful bridge in moving the technology forward.
Of course, an important component in such applications is ensuring that the system is safe. After all, the thought of wearing a head mounted display (HMD) while sliding around a track sounds like an accident waiting to happen.
“Safety is definitely a top priority,” Jacobs says. “You can’t actually see your surroundings while you’re in the Omni. You need to be strapped in, make sure you’re safe, but you’re also standing on a frictionless surface. You have to watch a video of this to really understand, it’s very hard to say in words.”
But so far, Omni has stood up to the gaming obstacles, which speaks to potential opportunities for use in healthcare-type settings.
“With our harness and our safety support structure, we’ve never had anyone fall on the Omni, especially in a high-intensity gaming situation; it’s even more intense when there’s zombies flying at you.”
High-performance detectors that are compatible with mainstream semiconductor device fabrication deliver high speed, ultra-sensitivity, and good timing resolution.
Recent advances in biomedical imaging include the enhancement of image contrast, 3D sectioning capability, and compatibility with specialized imaging modes such as fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM).1–3 Compared with other imaging methods, FLIM offers the highest image contrast because it measures the lifetime of the fluorescence, rather than just its intensity or wavelength characteristics. The contrasting fluorescence lifetime attributes can then enable the observer to discriminate between regions, such as identifying healthy and diseased tissue for cancer detection. In conventional FLIM, a discrete single-photon detector, typically based on photomultiplier tube (PMT) technology, enables the acquisition of a single focal spot.4 This focal spot is then raster-scanned across the field of view to form an image. This approach, however, requires sequential scanning—pixel by pixel—and thus results in a slow image acquisition rate.
If you are interested in the work of SENS and how Dr Haroldo Silva and his team are looking for ways to treat cancer why not come along and join them?
There is going to be a SENS AMA on Reddit with Aubrey de Grey and OncoSENS researcher Haroldo Silva. Ask them anything about SENS and the long term goal of developing universal cancer therapies.
Apparently, all the burgers and smoothies you’re consuming cause your brain to forget to stop eating even when you’re full.
Can you relate to midnight cravings and the feeling of perpetual hunger? Do you resort to grabbing fast food on the fly or eating out of a tub of ice cream while you’re bored around the house?
New research reveals obesity may be a brain disease that worsens in people with a diet high in sugar and fat. People who are diet conscious and eat healthy are less likely to indulge in sweet cravings and unhealthy snacks, since their brain recalls a sense of fulfillment derived from watching what they eat. Consuming sugars and fats hinders the functioning of the hippocampus area of one’s brain, blocking from their mind the memories of when their stomach felt full.
Elite athletes need never miss an opportunity to train again, even when they’re 40,000 feet above the ground.
A new luxury private plane for sports teams aims to keep athletes in top shape while travelling to and from events, thanks to on-board training facilities including exercise bikes and massage tables.
Russian luxury jet firm Sukhoi unveiled its concept SportJet at the Farnborough International Airshow in Hampshire this week.
WHAT: Scientists at the National Institutes of Health are reporting new, unexpected details about the fundamental structure of collagen, the most abundant protein in the human body. In lab experiments, they demonstrated that collagen, once viewed as inert, forms structures that regulate how certain enzymes break down and remodel body tissue. The finding of this regulatory system provides a molecular view of the potential role of physical forces at work in heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and other disease-related processes, they say. The study appears in the current online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists have known for years that collagen remodeling plays an important role in a wide variety of biological processes ranging from wound healing to cancer growth. In particular, researchers know that collagen is broken down by a certain class of enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), but exactly how they did this remained somewhat of a mystery, until now.
In the NIH study, the scientists isolated individual, nano-sized collagen fibrils from rat-tail tendons. They then exposed the collagen fibrils to fluorescently-labeled human MMP enzymes. Using video microscopy, the scientists tracked thousands of enzymes moving along a fibril. Unexpectedly, the scientists observed that the enzymes preferred to attach at certain sites along the fibril, and over time these attachment sites slowly moved, or disappeared and reappeared in other positions. These observations revealed collagen fibrils have defects that spontaneously form and heal. In the presence of tension, such as when tendons stretch, defects are likely eliminated, preventing enzymes from breaking down collagen that is loaded by physical force, the researchers suggest. In short, they identified a possible strain-sensitive mechanism for regulating tissue remodeling.
Ray Kurzweil is a celebrity technologist, well known both for his work as an inventor and for his relatively accurate predictions of technological change. Among his predictions is that of an imminent biotech revolution, which may enable people to restore and maintain healthy life for much longer periods of time than those humans have enjoyed historically. In the meantime, Ray says he takes 250 dietary supplements each day, in addition to receiving half a dozen intravenous therapies each week.
“Although my program may seem extreme, it is actually conservative – and optimal (based on my current knowledge). [My doctor] and I have extensively researched each of the several hundred therapies that I use for safety and efficacy. I stay away from ideas that are unproven or appear to be risky (the use of human-growth hormone, for example).” – Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near (pages 211–212)
Some of Ray’s dietary supplements are nootropics, intended to maintain and improve brain health. He lists them in his book, Transcend (pages 15 and 22). I’ve compared the nootropics he recommends to reviews on Examine.com, an independent and unbiased encyclopedia on supplementation and nutrition that is not affiliated in any way with any supplement company. Below is a table that summarizes what I found, followed by some observations.
Manoj Saxena is the executive chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs’ Fund IV (TEF), a $100m seed fund focused exclusively on the cognitive computing space.
Saxena is also the chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio branch and Chairman, SparkCognition an Austin based cognitive security and safety analytics company.
Prior to joining TEF, Saxena was general manager, IBM Watson, where his team built the world’s first cognitive systems in healthcare, financial services, and retail. Earlier he founded, built and sold two Austin based software startups.
