Wearable Muscle-Enhancing Suit from Japan

IN a lab in downtown Tokyo, grinning engineering students are peering past PC monitors and half-completed gadgets to watch one try and lift 40 kilograms of rice.

No mean feat, but luckily the student is about to be given a power boost.

He shuffles between some boxes and squat down as instructed by research student Hideyuki Umehara, aware of the clutter around him as he fights for floor space with the lower half of a mannequin, an electric wheelchair and an eerily realistic robotic head. 

Umehara places the bag of rice onto my outstretched arms. Then he presses a switch on the rucksack-like jacket the student is wearing, his hips are propelled forward and gradually his legs straighten until they are completely upright.

It takes a second to register, but the 40 kg of rice he just picked up like a human forklift truck suddenly seem as light as a feather. Thanks to the "muscle suit" Umehara slipped onto my back prior to the exercise. 

Fixed at the hips and shoulders by a padded waistband and straps, and extending part-way down the side of his legs, the exoskeleton has an A-shaped aluminium frame and sleeves that rotate freely at elbow and shoulder joints.

It weighs 9.2 kg, but the burst of air that Umehara injected into four artificial muscles attached on the back of the frame make both jacket and rice feel virtually weightless.

The muscle suit is one of a series of cybernetic exoskeletons developed by Hiroshi Kobayashi's team at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan. 

Scheduled for commercial release early next year, the wearable robot takes two forms: one augmenting the arms and back that is aimed at areas of commerce where heavy lifting is required. 

The other, a lighter, 5 kg version, will target the nursing industry to assist in lifting people in and out of bed, for example.

Kobayashi's muscle suit is the latest in a long line of exoskeletons dating back to General Electric's 1965 "man amplifier", the Hardiman. 

In the intervening years there have been a number of attempts to build devices that augment performance for soldiers, or to help disabled people. 

Some successful creations, such as the HULC by Ekso Bionics and Raytheon's XOS2, are still in development for the military.

Yet many exoskeleton projects hit problems early on that delayed or prevented commercial release. Most relate to the inability to generate sufficient power to safely drive the multiple motors required to mobilise the often-hefty suits.

Kobayashi believes his suit will be different. It doesn't have heavy electric actuators and hydraulics, but instead comes with PAMs - pneumatic artificial muscles. These lightweight, mesh-encased rubber bladders are designed to contract when pressurised air is pumped in. 

The PAMs give up to 30 kg of instant support or more, depending on how far the weight is away from the body. 

"The power-to-weight ratio is 400 times greater than motor-driven suits," says Kobayashi, who adds that unlike motors, PAMs are unaffected by water and dirt. 

A regulator controls the compressed air output based on a signal given by a microprocessor, which in turn communicates with an acceleration sensor in the frame that detects and responds to movement.

As well as its high power-to-weight ratio, the muscle suit's huge advantage, Kobayashi says, are its simple controls, which are largely preprogrammed to mimic natural human movements. 

Walking or lifting are triggered via the jacket's sensor, which responds to both simple voice commands, such as "start or "stop", and the body's acceleration. 

If the wearer is standing upright or moving more slowly than the preset acceleration threshold then the device will not move. A simple dial can control the suit's speed. 

The exoskeleton will be available to rent from ¥15,000 (£115) per month, although Japan's health insurance will cover 90 per cent of the charge in many cases.

"Years ago I was attracted by cool-looking robots, but basically they were of little use to society," Kobayashi said from his office, which is decorated with achievement awards and houses the prototype for his best-known creation, Saya the humanoid robot teacher. "I think our muscle suit is the only practically usable tool worldwide."

In Japan there has been a surge in R&D into exoskeletons, largely because of the country's rapidly ageing population: more than 30 per cent may be over 65 by 2025. In a recent science and technology white paper the government emphasised the need for robotic devices in a society where increasingly "the elderly will be caring for the elderly".

Later that day, the student gets the chance to try out the simpler version of the suit, which has no metal sleeves to support the arm. It is noticeably lighter, though the final product, says Umehara, will be lighter still, weighing around 4 kg. "I always thought this was part of fiction," he says, "but now, it's just a step away."

Hypertension treatment: The Future Solution is Simple, fast and safe

A new system can perform a one-time minimally invasive catheter-based percutaneous procedure that has shown to significantly reduce blood pressure–in as little as 30 seconds.

This new technology, developed by Vessix Vascular, has the potential to help the one in three adults in the United States who suffer from hypertension– a condition that is more common than cancer, diabetes and coronary artery disease combined.

Today, anti-hypertensive drugs are the primary treatment for hypertension. But despite the widespread use of drugs, only about half of hypertensive patients around the world are well controlled, even when multiple medications are taken at optimal dosages.

The V2 system perform a new procedural treatment called renal denervation, which Dr. Mehemet Oz has called “a profound game changer.” It uses a short blast of radiofrequency (RF) energy to disable the nerves surrounding the arteries leading to the kidneys, treating one of the key physiological contributors to hypertension.

The V2 Catheter is a balloon catheter with a unique configuration of RF electrodes mounted on its exterior, which makes the procedure faster and safer. It delivers precise temperature controlled RF energy from the V2 RF Generator to both renal arteries in 60 seconds, while the only other competatively marketed Renal Denervation system takes 50-60 minutes.

The rapidity of the V2 treatment promises to reduce patient discomfort as well as exposure to radiation for both the patient and the interventional cardiologist performing the procedure.

Photo courtesy: Vessix Vascular

Synthetics and Biology: Is it a working Partnership?

"Plastics" may have been the Baby Boomer watchword, but "synthetic" rules today.

That's "synthetic" as in synthetic biology, the hottest biomedical buzzword, promising new drugs, new fuel and someday, new life.

"If we can make life, then we understand it," says molecular biologist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla.

Starting with the building blocks of animal and plant cells, synthetic biologists are reengineering living things today and hope to create synthetic life tomorrow. The ultimate goal, Benner says, is "synthesizing life from scratch."

That makes experts, including human genome pioneers Craig Venter of Rockville, Md., and Jay Keasling of the University of California-Berkeley, hopeful and cautious at the same time about the promise and peril of the field.

In July, a team led by Carole Lartigue of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., reported the field's latest advance in the journal Science: a way to genetically engineer bacteria, previously considered impossible. "Nobody else has done anything remotely like this before," Venter says.

The immediate application is engineering defanged vaccine strains for use against the bacteria family chosen for the study. But a lot of other ideas are cooking, from saving the planet from global warming to figuring out just how life started in the first place.

The promise

In 1974, oncologist Wac{lstrok}aw Szybalski of the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison coined the term "synthetic biology" as a way to describe biologists shuffling genes among organisms. The term has taken on multiple meanings since then in science, says David Rejeski of the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The public largely has no clue, he says: "Nobody really knows what it is."

One popular definition championed by MIT's Drew Endy, who founded the non-profit Biobrick Foundation, is an engineering one, in which the parts of cells act as the screws, bolts, bricks and mortar of future biology. Others, such as Venter and Harvard's George Church, talk of building completely man-made cells, with parts all made from scratch.

Some recent innovations:

• Last year, Keasling's lab unveiled bacteria that make the anti-malaria drug artemisinin by transferring 14 genes into a microbe.

• Benner's lab has created an artificial form of DNA that uses six chemicals for the "bases" of a genetic code, unlike the four found in human DNA.

• In March, Church announced the creation of artificial "ribosomes," cellular factories that take messenger genes and make proteins that keep cells alive.

"Over the next 25 years, synthetic biologically engineered antibiotics could be developed which monitor the adaptation of the bacteria they are designed to kill, and modify their response accordingly," says Richard Kitney of the United Kingdom's Imperial College. "Similarly, synthetically engineered T-cell (immune cell) components could be used to develop a device which is capable of finding and killing cancerous cells."

Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Engineering

An Robotic Invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Consciousness in computer networks.

Hands across the AI Robotics Engineering Laboratory. Reach out to Intelligence in whatever form it may take!

Imagine a smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you or worse, one that answers that pesky phonecall from your annoying friends. The one you always let go to voicemail and if you don't know who that annoying friend is, it's probably YOU!

You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions.

Until now, research in artificial intelligence has been mainly occupied by myriad basic challenges that have turned out to be very complex, such as teaching machines to distinguish between everyday objects. Human-level artificial intelligence or self-evolving machines were seen as long-term, abstract goals not yet ready for serious consideration.

Now, for the first time, a panel of 25 AI scientists, roboticists, and ethical and legal scholars has been convened to address these issues, under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in Menlo Park, California. It looked at the feasibility and ramifications of seemingly far-fetched ideas, such as the possibility of the internet becoming self-aware.

The panel drew inspiration from the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA in California, in which over 140 biologists, physicians, and lawyers considered the possibilities and dangers of the then emerging technology for creating DNA sequences that did not exist in nature.

Delegates at that conference foresaw that genetic engineering would become widespread, even though practical applications – such as growing genetically modified crops – had not yet been developed.

Solar Impulse launched

On Friday the Solar Impulse was launched. The Impulse is the first aircraft designed to fly both day and night without using fossil fuel or releasing any emissions.

Developed by Bertrand Piccard, the son of the famous Swiss oceanographer and engineer Jacques Piccardand André Borschberg (PDF) Its mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of a complete day-night-day cycle propelled solely by solar energy.

Expected to make its first test flight between now and the end of 2009, first of all at Dübendorf airport and then from Payerne air base. A first complete night flight is programmed for 2010 and will take place over Switzerland.

Go Badger!

A University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student, Adam Wilson is among a growing group of researchers worldwide who aim to perfect a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally. Among those are people who have ALS, brain-stem stroke or high spinal cord injury.