‘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.
A Japanese robotics firm recently received approval from the FDA to bring its futuristic HAL Robot Suit to the U.S.
Cyberdyne has been developing the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) for nearly a decade, but only now has the firm been able to bring the technology stateside.
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.
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.”
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.
Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow couldn’t just toss away his New South Wales transit pass even after he found out that it got deactivated while he was on a trip to the USee, Meow-Meow (yes, that is his legal name) cut the chip out of the travel card, encased it in biocompatible plastic and had it implanted under the skin on his left hand. The biohacker now plans to file a lawsuit against New South Wales’ transport authorities, not just to fight the decision, but also to help create laws around body-hacking tech. In addition to the transit pass chip, Meow-Meow has two other implanted elect…
#Transhumanism in the Sunday Times of London. 750,000 copies out today. My pres campaign in it briefly, as well as other transhumanists.
The new Netflix series Altered Carbon is set in a dystopian future where the super-rich can avail of technology that allows them to upload their consciousness to a new body every time they die, in effect giving them immortality.
It’s science fiction, of the kind previously explored in the novels of Philip K Dick and William Gibson, movies such as RoboCop and The Terminator, manga comics like Ghost in the Shell and even the Man-Machine album by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk — but only until it comes to pass.
Dublin writer Mark O’Connell spent three years travelling the globe, meeting people who believe that they can actually achieve this by digitising their brains and transcending human flesh to become de facto cyborgs, impervious to…
Second Sight Medical (NSDQ: EYES) today announced the first trial implantation of its Orion cortical visual prosthesis system and updated on implantations of its Argus device and enrollment in an upcoming study.
The first implantation procedure was performed late last month by Dr. Nader Pouratian at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, the Sylmar, Calif.-based company said, as part of an FDA-cleared feasibility trial it won approval to launch last November.
The Orion cortical visual prosthesis system is designed to convert images captured by a miniature video camera, mounted on a patient’s glasses, into a series of electrical pulses which are transmitted wirelessly to an array of electrodes on the surface of the individual’s visual cortex.
I suspect this will be the hands for ATLAS. being field tested by human volunteers to see what it needs to do for average use. And, then blow that away within a few years.
Johnny Matheny is the first person to live with an advanced mind-controlled robotic arm. Last December, researchers from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab delivered the arm to Matheny at his home in Port Richey, Florida. Aside from the occasional demo, this is the first time the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) has spent significant time out of the lab.
Johns Hopkins has received more than $120 million from the US Defense Department to help pay for the arm’s development over the past 10 years.
Matheny, who lost his arm to cancer in 2005, is the first person to live with the MPL, but there are plans to have others try it out this year. There are a few things Matheny is not allowed to do with the arm, like getting it wet or drive while wearing it. But beyond that, the goal is to push the robotic prosthetic to its limits.