Lifeboat Foundation

According toDr Eric Leuthardt, a brain surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, neural prosthetics will become mainstream in the coming decades (stock image).

More than 200 artificial intelligence startups applied for Nvidia’s Inception contest, which seeks to identify the best AI startups. The company created the program to find new uses for its graphics processing units (GPUs), but it’s also hoping these startups will change the world.

So far, the company has identified more than 2,800 AI startups over the years through Inception. I listened to pitches from 12 finalists in a Shark Tank styled judging event last week. Each is competing to be one of three finalists to share the $1 million prize pool.

“We’re trying to enable our ecosystem of deep learning neural networks,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, as he introduced a panel of four judges. The 12 semi-finalists gave their 8-minute pitches, six finalists were selected, and the final winners will be picked at the company’s GPU Technology Conference on March 27 in San Jose, California. They ranged from AI for bionic arms to faster, cheaper, and more accurate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

Continue reading “Nvidia Inception’s AI health care startups cover neural interfaces to better MRI” »

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Intelligent Machines

The elderly may toss their walkers for this robotic suit.

An early prototype of a soft exoskeleton that helps you walk could prove useful for the military and the aging population.

Continue reading “In the near future, our grandparents might be sprightly with this robotic suit” »

‘Cyborg legs’ you can control with your MIND could help people learn to walk again after spinal injuries…

There could soon be real-life cyborgs walking among us.

Continue reading “These ‘cyborg legs’ help people with spinal injuries walk again” »

This bionic knee brace will give you superhuman strength…and it’s available to everyone!

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that allows them to print circuits on flexible, stretchable substrates using silver nanowires. The advance makes it possible to integrate the material into a wide array of electronic devices.

Silver nanowires have drawn significant interest in recent years for use in many applications, ranging from prosthetic devices to wearable health sensors, due to their flexibility, stretchability and conductive properties. While proof-of-concept experiments have been promising, there have been significant challenges to printing highly integrated circuits using silver nanowires.

Silver nanoparticles can be used to print circuits, but the nanoparticles produce circuits that are more brittle and less conductive than silver nanowires. But conventional techniques for printing circuits don’t work well with silver nanowires; the nanowires often clog the printing nozzles.

Continue reading “New technique allows printing of flexible, stretchable silver nanowire circuits” »

Inspired by the human eye, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed an adaptive metalens, that is essentially a flat, electronically controlled artificial eye. The adaptive metalens simultaneously controls for three of the major contributors to blurry images: focus, astigmatism, and image shift.

The research is published in Science Advances.

“This research combines breakthroughs in artificial muscle technology with metalens technology to create a tunable metalens that can change its focus in real time, just like the human eye,” said Alan She, a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the paper. “We go one step further to build the capability of dynamically correcting for aberrations such as astigmatism and image shift, which the human eye cannot naturally do.”

Continue reading “Researchers combine metalens with an artificial muscle” »

A collaborative research team has designed a wearable robot to support a person’s hip joint while walking. The team, led by Minoru Hashimoto, a professor of textile science and technology at Shinshu University in Japan, published the details of their prototype in Smart Materials and Structures, a journal published by the Institute of Physics.

“With a rapidly aging society, an increasing number of elderly people require care after suffering from stroke, and other-age related disabilities. Various technologies, devices, and robots are emerging to aid caretakers,” wrote Hashimoto, noting that several technologies meant to assist a person with walking are often cumbersome to the user. “[In our] current study, [we] sought to develop a lightweight, soft, wearable assist wear for supporting activities of daily life for older people with weakened muscles and those with mobility issues.”

The wearable system consists of plasticized polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel, mesh electrodes, and applied voltage. The mesh electrodes sandwich the gel, and when voltage is applied, the gel flexes and contracts, like a muscle. It’s a wearable actuator, the mechanism that causes movement.