Lifeboat Foundation

A Korean research team has developed a lithium-ion battery that is flexible enough to be stretched. Dr. Jeong Gon Son’s research team at the Photo-Electronic Hybrids Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that they had constructed a high-capacity, stretchable lithium-ion battery. The battery was developed by fabricating a structurally stretchable electrode consisting solely of electrode materials and then assembling with a stretchable gel electrolyte and stretchable packaging.

Rapid technological advancements in the electronics industry have led to a fast-growing market for high-performance wearable devices, such as smart bands and body-implantable electronic devices, such as pacemakers. These advancements have considerably increased the need for energy storage devices to be designed in flexible and stretchable forms that mimic human skin and organs.

However, it is very difficult to impart stretchability to the battery because the solid inorganic electrode material occupies most of the volume, and other components such as current collectors and separators must also be made stretchable. In addition, the problem of liquid electrolyte leakage under deformation must also be solved, as well as the problem of leaking liquid electrolyte.

TABLE OF CONTENTS —————
:00–15:11 : Introduction
:11–36:12 CHAPTER 1: POSTHUMANISM
a. Neurotechnology b. Neurophilosophy c. Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere.

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POSTHUMAN TECHNOLOGY
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Continue reading “Transhumanism 2.0 (Full Documentary)” »

Researchers at Technische Universität München in Germany have recently developed an electronic skin that could help to reproduce the human sense of touch in robots. This e-skin, presented in a paper published in MDPI’s Sensors journal, requires far less computational power than other existing e-skins and can thus be applied to larger portions of a robot’s body.

“Our main motivation for developing the e-skin stems from nature and is centered on the question of how we humans interact with our surrounding environment,” Florian Bergner, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “While humans predominantly depend on vision, our sense of touch is important as soon as contacts are involved in interactions. We believe that giving robots a sense of touch can extend the range of interactions between robots and humans—making robots more collaborative, safe and effective.”

Continue reading “A highly performing and efficient e-skin for robotic applications” »

A research collaboration and ensuing friendship between a trauma surgeon in Oregon and a handful of engineers in Florida has resulted in a new ventilator design that requires no electricity and could be a game-changer during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Albert Chi, who specializes in critical care and prosthetics, was keeping a close eye on COVID-19 during the early days. He immediately began working with his team at Oregon Health and Science University to develop a new, easy way to replicate ventilators that could be deployed anywhere. Specializing in trauma, Chi as a retired commander of the U.S. Navy Reserve and well versed in extreme conditions.

When Chi had a design, he called his friend and clinical-trial collaborator Albert Manero CEO and co-founder of Limbitless Solutions in Orlando, Florida.

Researchers from MIT have designed artificial muscles filled with water and powered by lithium batteries.

Existing electronic skin (e-skin) sensing platforms are equipped to monitor physical parameters using power from batteries or near-field communication. For e-skins to be applied in the next generation of robotics and medical devices, they must operate wirelessly and be self-powered. However, despite recent efforts to harvest energy from the human body, self-powered e-skin with the ability to perform biosensing with Bluetooth communication are limited because of the lack of a continuous energy source and limited power efficiency. Here, we report a flexible and fully perspiration-powered integrated electronic skin (PPES) for multiplexed metabolic sensing in situ. The battery-free e-skin contains multimodal sensors and highly efficient lactate biofuel cells that use a unique integration of zero- to three-dimensional nanomaterials to achieve high power intensity and long-term stability. The PPES delivered a record-breaking power density of 3.5 milliwatt·centimeter⁻² for biofuel cells in untreated human body fluids (human sweat) and displayed a very stable performance during a 60-hour continuous operation. It selectively monitored key metabolic analytes (e.g., urea, NH₄⁺, glucose, and pH) and the skin temperature during prolonged physical activities and wirelessly transmitted the data to the user interface using Bluetooth. The PPES was also able to monitor muscle contraction and work as a human-machine interface for human-prosthesis walking.

Recent advances in robotics have enabled soft electronic devices at different scales with excellent biocompatibility and mechanical properties; these advances have rendered novel robotic functionalities suitable for various medical applications, such as diagnosis and drug delivery, soft surgery tools, human-machine interaction (HMI), wearable computing, health monitoring, assistive robotics, and prosthesis (1–6). Electronic skin (e-skin) can have similar characteristics to human skin, such as mechanical durability and stretchability and the ability to measure various sensations such as temperature and pressure (7–11). Moreover, e-skin can be augmented with capabilities beyond those of the normal human skin by incorporating advanced bioelectronics materials and devices.

Circa 2015

A 55-year old Pittsburgh woman has successfully controlled a prosthetic arm — and now a Joint Strike Fighter aircraft — with just her thoughts.

While we might often take our sense of touch for granted, for researchers developing technologies to restore limb function in people paralyzed due to spinal cord injury or disease, re-establishing the sense of touch is an essential part of the process. And on April 23 in the journal Cell, a team of researchers at Battelle and the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center report that they have been able to restore sensation to the hand of a research participant with a severe spinal cord injury using a brain-computer interface (BCI) system. The technology harnesses neural signals that are so miniscule they can’t be perceived and enhances them via artificial sensory feedback sent back to the participant, resulting in greatly enriched motor function.

“We’re taking subperceptual touch events and boosting them into conscious perception,” says first author Patrick Ganzer, a principal research scientist at Battelle. “When we did this, we saw several functional improvements. It was a big eureka moment when we first restored the participant’s sense of touch.”

The participant in this study is Ian Burkhart, a 28-year-old man who suffered a spinal cord injury during a diving accident in 2010. Since 2014, Burkhart has been working with investigators on a project called NeuroLife that aims to restore function to his right arm. The device they have developed works through a system of electrodes on his skin and a small computer chip implanted in his motor cortex. This setup, which uses wires to route movement signals from the brain to the muscles, bypassing his spinal cord injury, gives Burkhart enough control over his arm and hand to lift a coffee mug, swipe a credit card, and play Guitar Hero.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh today published research showing how they’d solved a frustrating problem for people who use a brain-computer interface (BCI) to control prosthetic devices with their thoughts.

While the research itself is interesting – they created an algorithm that keeps the devices from constantly needing to be re-calibrated to handle the human brain’s fluctuating neuronal activity – the real takeaway here is how close we are to a universal BCI.

BCIs have been around for decades in one form or another, but they’re costly to maintain and difficult to keep working properly. Currently they only make sense for narrow use – specifically, in the case of those who’ve lost limbs. Because they’re already used to using their brain to control an appendage, it’s easier for scientists and researchers to harness those brainwaves to control prosthetic devices.