Bionics here soon?

It was several months after she lost her left arm at the shoulder in a motorcycle accident. She used her feet to hold the banana and peeled it with her right hand. She felt like a monkey. Now, Mitchell can peel a banana in a less simian posture. All she has to do is place her prosthetic left arm next to the banana and think about grabbing it. The mechanical hand closes around the fruit and she's ready to peel.

source

If these thing's can be produced at a sensible price level then they can only be a good thing for all people with disabilities, even more so with the numbers of men and women being maimed fighting for their country is increasing

They are here already. Micheal J. Fox has a brain implant that works as a pacemaker for the brain to control his parkisons syndroms. One of my family friends daughters has an insulin implant to eliminate the need for needles. It's expensive right now, and it may stay expensive for at least the next decade, but it will come down more once the production processes are ironed out and they are produced in mass numbers. Just imagine what this could do for us in a practicle sense. What types of jobs would having four(or eight) arms be an asset?

[edit on 14-9-2006 by sardion2000]

www.cnn.com...

One of these days, we're going to have the six million dollar man kicking our asses. Except I'd expect it to cost much more than 6 million dollars.

While all of this sounds terrific, I think we are traversing a proverbial "slippery slope".

Of course we are. Science fiction alone tells us that we are in for an army of bionic soldiers. We should also expect cloned soldiers with bio implants like infra red vision and laser eyes. No to mention what happens when a cop is shot to sh*t in the middle of a warehouse and they have to bring him back as...

ROBOCOP

We are very close to bionic aumentations becoming mainstream.
In robotics engineering alone we see some very interesting things, stuff I didnt imagine of ever existing... and I imagine alot...

For fun we experimented with a very crude version of augmentation. We messed around with using nerve signals to control a robotic arm. You'd be suprised how accurate we got it. It still de-calibrated horribly, as we had envisioned it doing, but when calibrated, it was accurate to within maybe half a degree of the movement of my own arm.
Of course it took quite some time to accurately guage just how much the arm should move depending on the strength of the nerve signal... and I'll tell you, the waveform of a nerve signal has to be smothed out ALOT before you can feasably use it... it looks like the wave form of a rock concert unless you do, and we didnt feel like having the half ton robotic arm flailing wildly because of it.

In the end, looking back, it was a very simplistic system. Most of the work resembled working on audio equipment.

It was just a short while ago that a new way of fusing brain matter with an Integrated Circuit became easier... man I wish we could play with THAT! But I wouldnt want to be the one to have my head cut open... not by my colleagues at least! lol.

We also tried a few other basic things... like powering an LED using the power coming from our own bodies... but what we used to gather that amount of energy ended up covering and weighing down the better half of both my arms... and... it only powered an LED... heh. Not to mention it was basically just using my body as the acid in a battery... we still used cathodes and anodes... so I wonder if it turned me a little acidic... it left a nice green stain on the inside of one arm... it washed off.
If we had more money, and better toys to work with, we could have made it alot more efficient, lighter, and smaller. But we just do half of this stuff out of curiosity.

Here's a fun thing to do... set an oscilloscope to it's most sensitive level, and set the period to read waves about one gigahertz... dont use the grounding wire... as youre measuring somthing akin to RF here, and not DC. Place the positive lead on different regions of your head, you can also use the nape of your neck. Also try finding waveforms on other parts of your body. It's about 5 minutes of fun, and you can show your friends the signals your body gives off.

Just REMEMBER to turn the peak to peak back to a less sensitive level before using the oscilloscope on any high levels again. You don't want to damage it. Oscilloscopes are pricy.

Originally posted by SpeakerofTruth
While all of this sounds terrific, I think we are traversing a proverbial "slippery slope".

this is excelent news. my kids grandparents on her moms side both lost their left leg above the knee when a drunk driver ran over them on their harley. i feel bad because my kids grandma has troubles walking even with her prosthetic leg.

it would be wonderful if my kids grandma and grandpa could walk more normal ,without using so much energy and effort, and it would be helpful for their esteem.

sometimes science and technology accomplish wonderful things for mankind.

peace

John, tell us a bit more about the experimenting you did. Where'd you find the plans, and how did you get into this?

(this is a nosy academic question. It relates to an area of research I'm doing)

Originally posted by SpeakerofTruth
While all of this sounds terrific, I think we are traversing a proverbial "slippery slope".

Science & Technology do not inherintly lead us down "slippery slopes." Some Ideologies incorporate idea's that are very slippery(Neocons for instance), and they may use technology to help them, but it's not technologies fault. The person who pulls the trigger is always at fault, I'm sorry.

[edit on 15-9-2006 by sardion2000]

I would have to agree. Technology is not a bad thing, it is only as bad as how the person uses it. Robotics can be used to really help humanity, and it would be a shame to see it all go to waste because a small group of people apose the use of this technology. It seems when new technology like this is introduced many people find a way to see the bad in it.

Hopefully over the next coming years, there will be many breakthroughs that will allow disabled people once again gain their independence...And even though I am only just starting out on my engineering life, I would like to be involved in this transformation, especially in the helping of something which could potentially lead to the helping of humanity.

John, tell us a bit more about the experimenting you did. Where'd you find the plans, and how did you get into this?

We didnt 'find any plans' so to speak. Rather one of our group had been reading a few too many scientific journals. Most of the playing around we do comes from one of us mentioning something that is theoretically possible... or already done and proven. Then we break it down.

With reading the nerve pulses. We already knew that the nerves used electrical signals, thats a given, what we didnt know is in what format. Were in robotics, not bio-mechanics or whatever you would call their field, so we had to find out for ourselves. Basically we just kept trying to read signals from our forearms, while we clenched our fists and opened our hands, until we could find some sort of distinguishable difference between the two. Then we used that for the claw's signal to open or close. After a while, we realised that we could get it more accurate, by using different strengths of the signal from your arm, to move the robotic arm only a little bit. That one took alot of fine tuning, and calibration... and re-calibration, and more re-calibration. Basically we had to match up the movement of the robotic arm with our own just about every 3 to 5 minutes we used it.

Now as for powering an LED with your own body... that was alot more basic. Do you remember back in public school, just about half of the science fair projects were "How to get electricity from a potato/lemon"? Well, we figured it can be done with the human body.
We're not actually extracting power from our bodies, rather, were using our bodies as something a cathode and anode can use as its battery.
Needless to say, we didnt want to cut skin, and needless to say, it didnt provide much power at all. As the "light a bulb with a lemon" trick, works because the lemon is acidic, we are not... well, maybe mike was... he acts like he does enough of it.
That wasnt all it was made out of... I do make all of this sound basic, we of course also inverted any lower peaks that we could pick up from the body, much like an AC/DC converter does, only our waveform, it looked more like we were playing in the stock market... heh.

Needless to say, that last one we basically said, screw it... and walked away from it.

I think it was after that, we found a video of a gauss cannon... so we tried to make one using electromagnets. Wow... talk about hard to re-load. Thats why we used electromagnets, so we could shut it off, so we could actually re-arm it. We put quite a few dents in the wall that week.
cant remember where we found the video that got us interested... maybe youtube, or google video... I dont know, search for gauss cannon. They are very simple to make... just a bunch of magnets, and when you see it, you'll notice I wasnt joking... just a bunch of magnets.

Of course, we also do actual work... but we like the fact that the lab is open to our curiosity aswell.

[edit on 18-9-2006 by johnsky]

who know's what's up in that situation?