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A Mind-Controlled Robotic Hand With A Sense Of Touch
Denis Aabo Sørensen lost his left hand nine years ago, while handling fireworks. Since then, he has used prosthetic hands, but never one like this. Last year, a team of European engineers created for him a prosthetic hand that connects directly to the remaining nerves in his upper arm. That means the hand is able to send sensations of touch back through his arm and into his brain. Plus, when Sørensen wanted to grab something, he could move the hand by simply thinking about it.
"The sensory feedback was incredible," Sørensen said in a statement. "When I held an object, I could feel if it was soft or hard, round or square."
"I could feel things that I hadn't been able to feel in over nine years," he said.
His feeling-hand prosthetic was an experimental prototype, so researchers had to remove the implant after a month of wear, following European law about experimental medical devices. While Sørensen had it on, however, he demonstrated for researchers that he was able to do things like distinguish between a bottle, a baseball and a mandarin orange, and press things with light, medium or firm pressure. He wore a blindfold and headphones while completing each of these tasks, to prove he could do them only by touch.
Researchers Monitor Sørensen's Prosthetic LifeHand 2/Patrizia Tocci
He could even adjust his grip as needed, all from his robotic sense of touch. "What we did was to provide this tactile information," Silvestro Micera, the hand's lead engineer, says. "It is the first time this is exploited in real time for modulating the force during the grasp." Micera is a robotics researcher with the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Italy and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
The implant is one more step in a worldwide effort by researchers to create prosthetics that have a natural sense of touch. Touch is essential for so many everyday tasks. Without it, prosthetics wearers must watch what they're picking up to help them judge whether they've got a good—but not too tight—grip on that banana or coffee cup. While that's workable, it's a far cry from the unconscious ease with which someone with natural hands is able to grip everything from a hammer to an egg.
Other researchers have made experimental, feeling prosthetics similar to Sørensen's and tested them in humans. One notable experiment was actually carried out 10 years ago. Sørensen's hand is another step forward, outside researchers I talked with say. One thing everyone was impressed by: The detail with which Micera and his team recorded what Sørensen could do with touch. The study volunteer, who is 36 years old and lives in Denmark, performed 700 individual tasks for the hand's creators.
"They really showed the value of having this feedback to the user and, in some ways, justified, in an actual use setting, an implanted interface with the nerve," says Dustin Tyler, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University who has made and studied feeling prosthetics in people.
"In my view, that volunteer is really doing science a great favor," says Daofen Chen, the program director in systems and cognitive neuroscience at the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who was not involved in the recent study.
Of course, touch-enabled prosthetics have a long way to go before they're available for most people to use. Sørensen's experimental hand illustrates what's left to do, and what many researchers, including Micera and Tyler, are working on now.
The hand required surgeons to implant electrodes directly onto Sørensen's nerves. There need to be more studies of how long electrodes like that last in the body. (No one wants to have to undergo extra surgeries because, oh no, my electrodes wore out again.) There's also the problem of all the computing hardware. Sørensen's prosthetic did serious math to translate what its sensors felt into an electrical signal that was meaningful to Sørensen's nerves and brain. So the hand connected to a laptop, to run the calculations, before connecting back to his nerves. Researchers are working on miniaturizing the computer so it can fit right in the implant.
Micera and his team published their work on Sørensen's implant today in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Source: http://www.popsci.com/article/science/mind-controlled-robotic-hand-sense-touch
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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