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Next-gen artificial limbs help amputees grab onto a better life
Even when Adrian Albrich sits still, you can hear the motors in his hand whirring. Bzzzt. Vrrrt. Zyyt. Little more than a month after doctors outfitted him with a new prosthetic left hand, Albrich still fidgets with it, clenching and unclenching, alternating grips, acclimating to the way it feels and reacts.
With spindly metal fingers, carbon-fiber knuckles and black silicon fingertips, there’s no mistaking Albrich’s prosthetic left hand for its muscle-and-bone counterpart, but the things it can do certainly come close. He can grasp a water bottle and twist off the cap. Pick up a quarter off the table. Hold a tiny finishing nail while he pounds it in with a hammer. He can even view a graph of the electric signals he uses to trigger it … on an iPhone. Try doing that with the real thing.
Though he’s one of the first recipients in the United States to receive one, Adrian’s hand – an i-Limb Digits from a company called Touch Bionics – is part of a growing wave of next-gen prosthetics. Using some of the same advanced technologies that power modern smartphones, these electronic limbs are finally making it out of experimental labs, and changing the way amputees, live, work, and play in the real world.
Twenty-six years ago, at the age of 19, Albrich was working at a sawmill in the little Oregon town of Baker City when a log buckled in a conveyor belt and kicked him into an 18-inch chop saw. The blade chewed through his left hand like one of the area’s plentiful ponderosa pines.
He lost the hand just below the wrist, leaving Albrich’s hand with no fingers, but some remaining movement where his forearm ends – a “partial hand,” in the parlance of prosthetists.
“It could have been much worse,” he says, with the confident air of a man who has long since given up on feeling sorry for himself. An 18-inch saw, after all, can take a lot more than a hand.
The blade chewed through his left hand like one of the area’s plentiful ponderosa pines.
In the nearly three decades since losing his left hand, Albrich has tried different prosthetics, but always arrived back at the same conclusion: They weren’t for him. He abandoned his standard two-fingered “hook” prosthetic when his children were born, for their own safety. And the clumsy replacements that came later left him self-conscious. The early models were always bigger than the hands they were meant to replace. “It felt like I was carrying a pool cue hanging out of my left shirt sleeve.” Albrich says.
Then he spotted the i-Limb Digits online, and Albrich decided it might be worth revisiting prosthetics. “The part that impressed me the most is that it was designed for someone with a partial hand, which no other prosthetic had been in the past,” Albrich says. No more pool cue.
After contacting a doctor in Seattle to see how he could go about getting his own Digits, Albrich ended up at Advanced Arm Dynamics, a Portland, Oregon clinic that specializes in prosthetics for upper extremities, including the advanced i-Limb Digits. Introduced a little more than a year ago, the bionic hand is still so new, the clinic speculates that fewer than 50 people in the United States have one.
Just as faster, smaller, more efficient processors allow our smartphones to get more powerful, more compact and run longer, the same advances are finding their way into active prosthetics. But the results are a lot more dramatic than being able to load Reddit two seconds faster, or snag an extra hour of video playback.
“Electric digits have been around for about 10 years, but the size of the fingers themselves, even over the past three years, has really improved to the point where we can fit them on a much larger percentage of the population,” says MacJulian Lang, the prosthetist who outfitted Albrich with his new hand. “The hand that he’s running, even 15 years ago, would have taken a backpack to run.” Now, ultra-efficient DC motors that move each finger fit right inside them, and the tiny processors and lithium-ion battery packs – similar to what you might find powering a smartphone – hide in a slim wrist strap.
Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/next-gen-artificial-limbs-put-finger-better-life
Source: http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/next-gen-artificial-limbs-put-finger-better-life/
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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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