Advanced Prosthetics Create Platform for Customization
Summit’s company, Bespoke Innovations, takes off-the-shelf prosthetics with the latest advances and surrounds them in personalized “fairings,” a term borrowed from the shapely casings that reduce drag on motorcycles.
His clients tend to be young and image-conscious — wounded military personnel and injured motorcyclists are prominent. To spread the word about the emerging design field, Summit is collaborating with celebrity amputees, among them Paralympic record-setter Aimee Mullins, who changed the conversation when she walked down a London fashion runway 14 years ago in designer legs carved from solid ash.
“What Scott’s onto is taking something that was … at best functional and elevating it to something that is coveted by people who have legs of flesh and bone,” said Mullins, 36, who was born without fibulae and had both legs amputated in infancy. “A prosthetic limb doesn’t represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space.”
(via latimes)
British Woman Considers Amputating Hand in Favor of Bionic Replacement
Nicola Wilding, 35, lost the use of her right arm in a car crash 12 years ago.
Nerve transplants have returned some movement to her upper arm, but she’s been told she’ll never be able to use her hand again.
Now, having seen a Newsnight film (BBC) on the work of Austrian surgeon Oskar Aszmann, she is actively considering having her hand cut off and replaced with a bionic prosthesis. […]
[more] [video source]
(via futurescope)
Researchers Use Legos to Manufacture Artificial Bones:
The tedious process of building up a sample of artificial bone requires a lot of repetitive dipping of samples into various substances, rinsing, and repeating. So to automate sample creation, the researchers built a couple of inexpensive laboratory robots using Lego Mindstorms.
The robots… handle the sample creation duties, freeing up the human researchers to focus on other laboratory tasks. Which is pretty clever.
Lego, for its part, sees an expanding role for itself in the laboratory and in education in general. The company has teamed up with Google for the 2012 Google Science Fair, which is a pretty cool initiative that encourages kids 13 to 18 to solve answer any question that’s been bothering them any which way they can.
(via Video: Cambridge Researchers Use Legos to Build Artificial Bone in the Lab | Popular Science)
BBC Asks: Is the Six Million Dollar Man Possible?:
Current bionic body part replacements can imitate human function, but considerable technological developments will be necessary before entering an era of enhancement.
Dr Anders Sandberg, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, told the BBC: “I do think it is possible to reconstruct a body quite easily and get into a six-million-dollar man situation.” For the next 10 years, he thinks the field will be at the level of “pretty nice prosthetics”, but would then start to be “significantly better” than the real thing.
He said: “I think mid-century, I would be rather surprised if there wasn’t a lot of implants and enhancements around.”
Options could include “sensory augmentation; ways of extending our senses such as infra-red sight or ultra-violet; or extending hearing.” He says one day blind people who are fitted with artificial retinas will not only be given sight, but, rather like a smartphone, a range of apps will emerge that would allow recording, zooming and augmented reality. “Eventually you reach the point where you can start doing things that normal people can’t do,” he said.
(via BBC News - Is the Six-Million-Dollar Man possible?)
(ht Singularitarian)
![BBC Asks: Can you build a human body?
Technology has always strived to match the incredible sophistication of the human body. Now electronics and hi-tech materials are replacing whole limbs and organs in a merger of machine and man.
Later this year a team of researchers will try out the first bionic eye implant in the UK hoping to help a blind patient see for the first time. It is one of the extraordinary medical breakthroughs in the field, which are extending life by years and providing near-natural movement for those who have lost limbs.
Over the coming weeks, BBC News will explore the field of bionics in a series of features. We start with a selection of the latest scientific developments.
The Bionic Bodies series on the BBC News website will be looking at how bionics can transform people’s lives. We will meet a woman deciding whether to have her hand cut off for a bionic replacement and analyse the potential to take the technology even further, enhancing the body to superhuman levels. The series continues on Wednesday with a look at some of the earliest prosthetics from ancient Egypt.
[more]
[via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0ez9pm9au1r08k60o1_500.png)
BBC Asks: Can you build a human body?
Technology has always strived to match the incredible sophistication of the human body. Now electronics and hi-tech materials are replacing whole limbs and organs in a merger of machine and man.
Later this year a team of researchers will try out the first bionic eye implant in the UK hoping to help a blind patient see for the first time. It is one of the extraordinary medical breakthroughs in the field, which are extending life by years and providing near-natural movement for those who have lost limbs.
Over the coming weeks, BBC News will explore the field of bionics in a series of features. We start with a selection of the latest scientific developments.
The Bionic Bodies series on the BBC News website will be looking at how bionics can transform people’s lives. We will meet a woman deciding whether to have her hand cut off for a bionic replacement and analyse the potential to take the technology even further, enhancing the body to superhuman levels. The series continues on Wednesday with a look at some of the earliest prosthetics from ancient Egypt.
[more]
[via]
(Source: futurescope)
New Artificial Heart Improves Durability by Dispensing With Pulse:
Building a heart that mimics nature’s lub-dub may be as comically shortsighted as Leonardo da Vinci designing a flying machine with flapping wings. Nature is not always the best designer, at least when it comes to things that humans must build and maintain. So the newest artificial heart doesn’t imitate the cardiac muscle at all. Instead, it whirs like a little propeller, pushing blood through the body at a steady rate. After 500 million years of evolution accustoming the human body to blood moving through us in spurts, a pulse may not be necessary. That, in any case, is the point of view of the 50-odd calves, and no fewer than three human beings, who have gotten along just fine with their blood coursing through them as evenly as Freon through an air conditioner.
(via No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart | Popular Science)
Researchers Develop Interface for Paralyzed to Control Machines With Their Tongues:
A group of engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a way to control… just about anything (but most likely, things like wheelchairs) with a combination of a magnetic tongue piercing and a paired retainer.
The user would press the tongue piercing against different parts of the retainer to send signals.
…The system is called the Tongue Drive, and it relies on a waterproof retainer on the roof of the mouth containing a Li-ion battery, induction coil for charging, and and several magnetic contact points to detect the position of the tongue-mounted magnet. It’ll then beam the signal wirelessly to a mobile device—iOS devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch are mentioned—and the mobile device shoots those commands over to whichever device is meant to be controlled.
(via Steer Your Wheelchair With Your Computerized Tongue Piercing | Popular Science)
Neural Interfaces Allow Brain to Control, “Feel” Prosthetic Limbs Directly:
Connecting mechanical instruments to human nerves is complex on several levels because the interface would need to share several special properties between man and machine. It would have to be biocompatible to promote nerve and tissue growth, but mechanically compatible to allow electrodes to connect to external circuits. It would have to be structured to avoid harming surrounding tissue, but it would have to work in concert with that tissue to serve as a real replacement limb.
New biocompatible interface scaffolds designed by Sandia researchers are a step in that direction. Scientists electrospun liquid polymers to create polymer chains, forming a fiber structure. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes incorporated into the fibers provides electrical conductivity. Using this method, the team created scaffolds with two types of polymer, according to Sandia — PBF, which was developed for tissue engineering, and PDMS, a sort of biocompatible caulk. PBF is biodegradable, so the scaffold would disintegrate once installed, leaving the electrical contacts behind. PDMS is not biodegradable.
The idea is that a scaffold would provide a connection between existing nerves and new electronics, containing enough pores to let new nerves grow. The newly innervated limb would then theoretically have the same sensory characteristics as a real one.
(via New Neural Interfaces Can Bring True Feeling to Artificial Limbs | Popular Science)
Implants and Bionic Glasses Restore Limited Sight to the Blind:
The process that allows the blind to see starts with a pair of sunglasses, which sport a tiny video camera mounted in the bridge just above the nose. The camera captures an image and sends it down a wire to a visual processing unit hanging on the patient’s belt. That VPU—which is a little larger than a smartphone—converts the world’s complexities into a 60-pixel image in black and white, which it sends back to transponders on the glasses. From there the image goes wirelessly to antennas wrapped around the sides of the eyeballs, and from there to the 60-electrode arrays that are tacked to the delicate retinas.
The Argus II system can’t help all blind people, only those with degeneration of the retina’s photoreceptor cells. The electrodes take the place of those damaged photoreceptors and stimulate the cells that are attached to the optic nerve. So far, Second Sight has concentrated on patients with retinitis pigmentosa—the disease Campbell has—but the company’s device may also help with macular degeneration. Greenberg says that about 200 000 people in the United States and Europe could benefit from the implants.
Stamford Researchers Develop Elastic, Touch-Sensitive Robot Skin:
The brainchild of Stanford University Associate Professor of chemical engineering Zhenan Bao, this “super skin” employs a transparent film of spray-on, single-walled carbon nanotubes that sit in a thin film of flexible silicon, which is then sandwiched between more silicon.
After an initial stretch, which actually aligns the randomly sprayed-on conductive, carbon nanotubes into microscopic spring-like forms, the skin can be stretched and restretched again to twice its original size, without the springs or skin losing their resiliency. Darren Lipomi, a postdoctoral researcher who is part of Bao’s research team explained, “None of it causes any permanent deformation.”
This unique makeup allows the malleable skin to measure force response even as it’s being stretched, or “squeezed like a sponge.” Researchers noted that it can also sense touch and force at the same time.
(via Artificial Super-Skin Could Transform Phones, Robots and Artificial Limbs)
