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Contest for devices to help deaf feel music

editor1 — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:45:45 +0000

The search is on for portable, wireless devices that would enable deaf or hard-of-hearing people to experience live music by feeling sound waves.

A U-M contest will award a total of $10,000 to teams of students who develop the best prototypes. Contest designers say such devices could enhance the experience of music for the hearing community as well.

This technology challenge is led by the College of Engineering Center for Entrepreneurship in collaboration with the entrepreneurship student organization Mpowered and the Department of Performing Arts Technology in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance.

Also cooperating in the contest is the Deaf Performing Artists Network (D-PAN). The contest officially began Sept. 19 at a gala event to release D-PAN’s debut video compilation of American Sign Language-focused music videos titled “It’s Everybody’s Music Vol. 1.”

“This contest is an opportunity for our best student engineers and entrepreneurs to develop devices that allow members of the deaf community to experience music in a new way,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship.

This contest emerged from a chance meeting. Zurbuchen sat next to D-PAN co-founder Joel Martin on a plane.

“The idea with this contest is for the participants to design something that works wirelessly so that it can be worn to any concert, as a belt, or as part of some article of clothing,” Martin says. “It should not segregate a person who is deaf from the rest of the audience. It should be something a hearing person could also wear to enhance the musical experience.”

Jason Corey, an assistant professor in the Department of Performing Arts Technology, says this task goes beyond adapting technology. It will involve interpretation and arrangement, in a sense.

Read more on University of Michigan Alumnus

Computerized Leg Device to Help Elderly Walk

editor1 — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:57:24 +0000

Honda Motor, a pioneer of humanoid robots, on Friday unveiled a new walking assist machine designed to make it easier for the elderly to climb stairs and help factory workers.

The computerized leg device is the latest addition to walking technology developed by the Japanese automaker, which announced the world’s first two-legged walking robot, ASIMO, in 2000.

The 6.5 kilogram (14.3-pound) device — consisting of a saddle, leg-like frames and shoes — can reduce the load on users’ legs while walking or climbing and descending stairs by supporting bodyweight, Honda said.

Honda said the motor-powered machine is still at an experimental stage, but elderly people and people undergoing rehabilitation who need support for their leg muscles and joints are the main target.

The device is also expected to help assembly workers to keep a crouching position, Honda said, adding that it plans to test the device at one of its factories north of Tokyo.

Like with a unicycle, users ride on the seat sustained by frames that can bend and extend like knees with two motors controlled by signals from sensors inside the shoes.

“We used ASIMO’s technology for developing the walking assist device,” Masato Hirose, a senior engineer at Honda Research and Development, told AFP.

“ASIMO is designed to be used as a tool, but the walking assist device is designed to complement real human bodies,” he said. “Both will exist for the sake of people.”

Brain Trauma in Iraq

editor1 — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:54:10 +0000

A few days into his tour of duty at the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, Colonel Geoffrey Ling, a U.S. Army neurologist, noticed something unusual. Soldiers who had sustained severe head injuries in blasts from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) appeared to be in much worse shape than he would have expected given his experience with patients who had suffered seemingly similar injuries in car accidents and assaults. The brains of the injured soldiers were swollen and appeared “a very angry red,” he recalls. Some soldiers were conscious and could talk normally but were stumbling around the hospital, unable to keep their balance. “Their [brain] scans were stone-cold normal, and when you talked to them, they seemed fine,” says Ling, who is now a staff physician at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and a program manager in the Defense Sciences Office at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, VA. “But when I started testing them, like asking them to do addition, they were clearly not normal.”
By the time Ling arrived in Iraq, in 2005, thousands of U.S. soldiers had experienced IED attacks. While many of them had survived the concussive blasts, Ling and other physicians had begun to notice that a worrisome number were showing signs of brain damage. Ling, who is a neuroscientist as well as a neurologist, was puzzled. “Why does this injury look different?” he wondered. “What is it in the blast that’s causing it–the pressure, the noise, the cloud of fume?” After months of treating blast wounds in both American troops and Iraqi security forces, Ling had returned from his tour determined to wage war on brain injury. He knew that the answers to these questions could be crucial to protecting soldiers in the field and screening and treating them when they came home.

Harnessing The Power Of The Brain

editor1 — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:34:05 +0000

Once in a while, we run across a science story that is hard to believe until you see it. That’s how we felt about this story when we first saw human beings operating computers, writing e-mails, and driving wheelchairs with nothing but their thoughts.

Quietly in a number of laboratories, an astounding technology is developing that directly connects the human brain to a computer. It’s like a sudden leap in human evolution - a leap that could one day help paralyzed people to walk again and amputees to move bionic limbs. As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, the connection has already been made for a few people, and for them it has been life changing.

Scott Mackler was a husband, father and successful neuroscientist when he received perhaps the worst news imaginable. At the age of 40, he could run a marathon in three and a half hours, but it was about that time he discovered he had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

His brain was losing its connection to virtually every muscle in his body. The near-total paralysis would also stop his lungs. He didn’t want to live on a ventilator, so nine years ago he recorded this message for his two sons.

“I know the future holds lot of love and joy and pride and that life goes on and I’ll be watching you along the way and I love you very much and I’ll see ya,” he said in a home video.

Today, Scott Mackler’s mind is sharp as ever, but his body has failed. Doctors call it “locked in” syndrome. Scott and his wife Lynn learned to communicate with about the only thing he has left, eye movement.

New Brain-Machine Interface Reactivates Monkey’s Paralyzed Muscles

editor1 — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:11:21 +0000

For years, doctors have treated patients suffering from life-threatening heart blockages by adding new blood vessels that reroute blood around arterial traffic snarls. Researchers have been working on methods for doing an electronic bypass around a damaged spine with the aim of restoring movement to paralyzed limbs.

Though it will be years before spinal bypass surgery reaches even the clinical-experiment stage, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and the Washington National Primate Research Center, both in Seattle, have figured out a way to get macaque monkeys in their lab to manipulate temporarily paralyzed muscles in their arms using brain-controlled electrical stimulation. In research reported last week in Nature, they describe what happened when they attached electrodes to neurons in a monkey’s motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement—and used fairly simple algorithms to translate activity in these cortical cells into electrical signals that tell muscles when, how much, and how forcefully to contract.

In exchange for a reward of applesauce, the monkeys had been conditioned to create just the right amount of torque in their wrists to move a cursor on a display so that it hit a target. To conduct the experiments, the researchers used anesthesia to block signals in a nerve just below the shoulder of a monkey’s arm, temporarily paralyzing the rest of the limb.
Read more on IEEE Spectrum

Jacking into the Brain — Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface?

editor1 — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:05:00 +0000

The cyberpunk science fiction that emerged in the 1980s routinely paraded “neural implants” for hooking a computing device directly to the brain: “I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head,” proclaimed the protagonist of “Johnny Mnemonic,” a William Gibson story that later became a wholly forgettable movie starring Keanu Reeves.

The genius of the then emergent genre (back in the days when a megabyte could still wow) was its juxtaposition of low-life retro culture with technology that seemed only barely beyond the capabilities of the deftest biomedical engineer. Although the implants could not have been replicated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, the best cyberpunk authors gave the impression that these inventions might yet materialize one day, perhaps even in the reader’s own lifetime.

In the past 10 years, however, more realistic approximations of technologies originally evoked in the cyberpunk literature have made their appearance. A person with electrodes implanted inside his brain has used neural signals alone to control a prosthetic arm, a prelude to allowing a human to bypass limbs immobilized by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or stroke. Researchers are also investigating how to send electrical messages in the other direction as well, providing feedback that enables a primate to actually sense what a robotic arm is touching.

But how far can we go in fashioning replacement parts for the brain and the rest of the nervous system? Besides controlling a computer cursor or robot arm, will the technology somehow actually enable the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons to function as a clandestine repository for pilfered industrial espionage data or another plot element borrowed from Gibson?

Improving Vision

editor1 — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:42:03 +0000

Many people are familiar with the popular science fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show featuring a blind character named Geordi La Forge, whose visor-like glasses enable him to see. What many people do not know is that a product very similar to Geordi’s glasses is available to assist people with vision conditions, and a NASA engineer’s expertise contributed to its development.

The JORDY™ (Joint Optical Reflective Display) device, designed and manufactured by a privately-held medical device company known as Enhanced Vision, enables people with low vision to read, write, and watch television. Low vision, which includes macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma, describes eyesight that is 20/70 or worse, and cannot be fully corrected with conventional glasses.

Unlike someone who is blind, a person with low vision retains a small part of his or her useful sight. JORDY enables people to see using their remaining sight by magnifying objects up to 50 times and allowing them to change contrast, brightness, and display modes, depending on what works best for their low vision condition. With this device, people can see objects at any range, from up close to distant. It also provides the flexibility for the user to enjoy theatre, sporting events, and more. JORDY functions as a portable display that is worn like a pair of glasses and as a fully functional desktop video magnifier when placed on a docking stand.

Autonomous Wheelchair Responds to Verbal Command

editor1 — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:40:11 +0000

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Mass, are developing an autonomous wheelchair that can learn all about the locations in a given building, and then take its user to a given place in response to a verbal command.

According to Nicholas Roy, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and co-developer of the wheelchair, by saying “take me to the cafeteria” or “go to my room,” the wheelchair user would be able to avoid the need for controlling every twist and turn of the route and could simply sit back and relax as the chair moves from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory.

“It’s a system that can learn and adapt to the user,” Roy says. “People have different preferences and different ways of referring to places and objects, and the aim is to have each wheelchair personalized for its user and the user’s environment.”

The MIT system can learn about its environment the same way a person could—by being taken on a guided tour, with important places identified along the way. For example, as the wheelchair is pushed around a nursing home for the first time, the patient or a caregiver would say: “this is my room” or “here we are in the foyer” or “nurse’s station.”

Movement Restored to Paralyzed Limbs through Artificial Brain-Muscle Connections

editor1 — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:53:12 +0000

Researchers in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have demonstrated for the first time that a direct artificial connection from the brain to muscles can restore voluntary movement in monkeys whose arms have been temporarily anesthetized. The results may have promising implications for the quarter of a million Americans affected by spinal cord injuries and thousands of others with paralyzing neurological diseases, although clinical applications are years away.

“This study demonstrates a novel approach to restoring movement through neuroprosthetic devices, one that would link a person’s brain to the activation of individual muscles in a paralyzed limb to produce natural control and movements,” said Joseph Pancrazio, PhD, a program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

The research was conducted by Eberhard E. Fetz, Ph.D., professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington in Seattle and an NINDS Javits awardee; Chet T. Moritz, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow funded by NINDS; and Steve I. Perlmutter, PhD, research associate professor. The results appear online at Nature. The study was performed at the Washington National Primate Research Center, which is funded by NIH’s National Center for Research Resources.

In the study, the researchers trained monkeys to control the activity of single nerve cells in the motor cortex, an area of the brain that controls voluntary movements. Neuronal activity was detected using a type of brain-computer interface. In this case, electrodes implanted in the motor cortex were connected via external circuitry to a computer. The neural activity led to movements of a cursor, as monkeys played a target practice game.

Want an Easy Way to Control Your Gadgets? Talk to Them.

editor1 — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:50:16 +0000

The builders of mobile gadgets face a paradox. They want to make the most powerful device they can, squeezed into the smallest box possible. But for a device to be useful, human beings have to be able to interact with all its features. More and more functions mean more and more buttons—and humans have stubbornly remained the same size and shape. A button can be made only so small before it becomes impossible to press, putting a tough limit on miniaturization. Different devices confront this paradox in different ways: Cell phone keypad buttons routinely do double, triple, and even quadruple duty, while devices like tablet computers use touch screens and gesture recognition.

AT&T is developing another solution. It wants you to be able simply to talk to an electronic device and have it follow your instructions. While some cell phones already offer voice recognition for basic tasks, such as looking up phone numbers in a contact list, AT&T envisions devices that can handle much more complicated voice commands, such as “Tell me where I can find the nearest ATM” or “Order me a pepperoni pizza.”