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How to Give Fake Hands Real Feeling
In Zhenan Bao’s lab at Stanford, researchers are inventing materials for touch-sensitive prosthetics.
The human hand has 17,000 touch sensors that help us pick things up and connect us to the physical world. A prosthetic hand or foot has no feeling at all.
Zhenan Bao hopes to change that by wrapping prosthetics with electronic skin that can sense pressure, heal when cut, and process sensory data. It’s a critical step toward prosthetics that one day could be wired to the nervous system to deliver a sense of touch. Even before that is possible, soft yet grippy electronic skin would let amputees and burn victims do more everyday tasks like picking up delicate objects—and possibly help alleviate phantom-limb pain.
To mimic and in some ways surpass the capabilities of the skin on human hands, Bao is rethinking what an electronic material can be. Electronic skin should be not only sensitive to pressure but also lightweight, durable, stretchy, pliable, and self-healing, just like real skin. It should also be relatively inexpensive to manufacture in large sheets for wrapping around prosthetics. Traditional electronic materials are none of these things.
Bao (an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 in 2003) has been working on electronic skin since 2010. She has had to create new chemical recipes for every electronic component, replacing rigid materials like silicon with flexible organic molecules, polymers, and nanomaterials.
Bao’s group uses stretchy rubber materials that are similar to human skin in the way they give and recover. Sometimes her team mixes electronic materials into the rubber; other times they build on top of it. To make a touch sensor, researchers mix in carbon that is electrically conductive. The voltage across this conductive rubber sheet changes when the material is pressed. Bao’s group found that covering these touch sensors with a pattern of microscale pyramids improves their touch sensitivity—much as the whorls of our fingerprints do. Depending on the design, these sensors can be made at least as sensitive as the skin on our hands. Her group also prints transistors, electrical leads, and other components on the rubbery skins to make stretchy circuits that could process data from touch sensors on a prosthetic hand.
Now Bao is working on weirder materials. One polymer she developed is much stretchier than human skin: it can be pulled to 100 times its normal length without breaking. This material also heals when cut, without any heat or other trigger. And it can act as a weak artificial muscle, expanding and contracting when an electric field is applied.
With the basic materials and designs in place, she’s working on semiconductors and other electronic materials that have the same healing and stretching prowess. But reinventing the electronic materials won’t be enough: data from these artificial skins has to be delivered to the nervous system in a format that the body can understand. Bao’s group is now working on circuit designs that will send signals to the nervous system, so that electronic skins will one day not only help amputees regain dexterity but also let them feel the touch of their loved ones.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602092/how-to-give-fake-hands-real-feeling
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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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