For COVID-19 sufferers who have lost their sense of smell there is the promis of a future bionic nose.
Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University are building a neuroprosthetic to help those who lose their ability to smell.
Category: cyborgs – Page 36
A titanium robotic exoskeleton is helping an eight-year-old boy in Mexico learn to walk after being wheelchair-bound for most of his life.
The boy, David, suffers from cerebral palsy, a group of neurological disorders that surfaces during early childhood and hinders a child’s ability to control their muscle movements. In effect, it makes it extremely difficult for an affected child to walk and maintain their balance and posture.
As you can imagine, rehabilitating a child with cerebral palsy is a long and arduous process. But now, David’s speeding up his rehabilitation with the help of the battery-powered Atlas 2030 exoskeleton, developed by award winning Spanish roboticist Elena García Armada.
“This exoskeleton personalizes assistance as people walk normally through the real world,” said Steve Collins, associate professor of mechanical engineering who leads the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory, in a press release. “And it resulted in exceptional improvements in walking speed and energy economy.”
The personalization is enabled by a machine learning algorithm, which the team trained using emulators—that is, machines that collected data on motion and energy expenditure from volunteers who were hooked up to them. The volunteers walked at varying speeds under imagined scenarios, like trying to catch a bus or taking a stroll through a park.
The algorithm drew connections between these scenarios and peoples’ energy expenditure, applying the connections to learn in real time how to help wearers walk in a way that’s actually useful to them. When a new person puts on the boot, the algorithm tests a different pattern of assistance each time they walk, measuring how their movements change in response. There’s a short learning curve, but on average the algorithm was able to effectively tailor itself to new users in just an hour.
Inspired by insects, robotic engineers are creating machines that could aid in search and rescue, pollinate plants and sniff out gas leaks.
Cyborg cockroaches that find earthquake survivors. A “robofly” that sniffs out gas leaks. Flying lightning bugs that pollinate farms in space.
These aren’t just buzzy ideas, they’re becoming reality.
Robotic engineers are scouring the insect world for inspiration. Some are strapping 3D-printed sensors onto live Madagascar hissing cockroaches, while others are creating fully robotic bugs inspired by the ways insects move and fly.
Robotic engineers are scouring the insect world for inspiration, and creating machines that could be used for emergency response, farming and energy.
The users can effectively manipulate the prosthetics exactly like they would with an intact limb.
University of Utah researchers have developed the most advanced AI-powered prosthetics “ever created,” prompting Ottobock, the world’s largest prosthetic manufacturer, to collaborate with them to launch the project globally.
“Our @LabBionic [Bionic engineering lab] has developed the “Utah Bionic Leg,” the most advanced bionic leg ever created. Now, we’ve forged a partnership with the worldwide leader in the prosthetics industry, @OttobockUK, to bring it to individuals with lower-limb amputations,” the university’s official account tweeted on Friday.
The University of Utah has developed the most advanced AI-powered prosthetics “ever created,” prompting Ottobock, the world’s largest prosthetic manufacturer, to collaborate with them to launch the project globally.
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For the memory prosthetic, the team focused on two specific regions: CA1 and CA3, which form a highly interconnected neural circuit. Decades of work in rodents, primates, and humans have pointed to this neural highway as the crux for encoding memories.
The team members, led by Drs. Dong Song from the University of Southern California and Robert Hampson at Wake Forest School of Medicine, are no strangers to memory prosthetics. With “memory bioengineer” Dr. Theodore Berger—who’s worked on hijacking the CA3-CA1 circuit for memory improvement for over three decades—the dream team had their first success in humans in 2015.
The central idea is simple: replicate the hippocampus’ signals with a digital replace ment. It’s no easy task. Unlike computer circuits, neural circuits are non-linear. This means that signals are often extremely noisy and overlap in time, which bolsters—or inhibits—neural signals. As Berger said at the time: “It’s a chaotic black box.”
Engineers at EPFL have found a way to insert carbon nanotubes into photosynthetic bacteria, which greatly improves their electrical output. They even pass these nanotubes down to their offspring when they divide, through what the team calls “inherited nanobionics.”
Solar cells are the leading source of renewable energy, but their production has a large environmental footprint. As with many things, we can take cues from nature about how to improve our own devices, and in this case photosynthetic bacteria, which get their energy from sunlight, could be used in microbial fuel cells.
In the new study, the EPFL team gave these bacteria a boost by inserting carbon nanotubes – tiny rolled-up sheets of graphene, a material that’s famously conductive. The nanotube-loaded bugs were able to produce up to 15 times more electricity than their non-edited counterparts from the same amount of sunlight.
AS man and machine get ever closer, the world of sex tech seems to get a little stranger.
We’ve rounded up some of the most bizarre sex tech inventions that are in the works, including an exoskeleton could let humans make love in the metaverse.
Humans may rely on exoskeletons to have realistic sex in the metaverse, one sex tech expert has revealed.