Science fiction comes to life in Italian lab

A bionic hand at the Istitute of Biorobotic of the Italian University St. Anna School in Pisa.

At the university, a bionic arm commanded by the human brain or a limb extension that allows rescuers to lift rubble after earthquakes are just some of the futuristic innovations in the pipeline.

At Italy's Sant'Anna university, a bionic arm commanded by the human brain or a limb extension that allows rescuers to lift rubble after earthquakes are just some of the futuristic innovations in the pipeline.

"The idea is to get robots out of factories where they have shown their worth and to transform them into household machines which can live together with humans," says Professor Paolo Dario, director of the college's bio-robotics department.

The university in the historic town of Pisa in Tuscany is a veritable factory of ideas.

Researchers here are working on projects ranging from a robot that can come to your door to collect your recycling to tomatoes that slow the effects of ageing and plants that survive underwater to help flood-prone regions of the world.

A Body Extender robot at the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory at Sant'Anna University in Pisa, Italy.

The exoskeleton or "body extender", a prototype costing a million euros, meanwhile, is a kind of armour weighing 160 kilos which multiplies the strength of its human user by 20. "You can innovate here.

Whoever has a project gets help, ideas are not blocked. We are investing in individuals," the rector of Sant'Anna, Maria Chiara Carrozza, a professor of bio-robotics said in an interview.

The dustcart looks like the famous R2-D2 from Star Wars with its laser scanner and location sensors.

The idea is that it can work through phone bookings to come to your street at a fixed time to collect your waste.

"We tested it for two months with 15 families living in one of the towns near here. Everything worked well but there are still some problems to sort out," said Pericle Salvini, a member of the team behind the project.

"First of all it is slow for security reasons and it sometimes blocks the traffic. Also it cannot legally be on the road since there is no type of insurance for this type of robot in case of an accident," he said.

Researcher Pericle Salvini work on a DustClean Robot at the Institute of Biorobotic at Sant'Anna University in Pisa.

The dustcart looks like the famous R2-D2 from Star Wars with its laser scanner and location sensors.

The idea is that it can work through phone bookings to come to your street at a fixed time to collect your waste.

Professor Dario also heads up a project entitled "The Robot Companions for Citizens" which is one of six contestants for a European Union prize of one billion euros ($1.2 billion) in funding spread out over a decade.

Marco Controzzi, who is working on a bionic arm, says it will operate by using electrodes attached to the skin or implanted in your head. "It will move only according to your intentions," he said, adding that powering it would be easy as it can run on just two mobile phone batteries.

The exoskeleton or "body extender", a prototype costing a million euros, meanwhile, is a kind of armour weighing 160 kilos (353 pounds) which multiplies the strength of its human user by 20. "The idea is to use this type of instrument for emergency workers in disasters like an earthquake," said engineer Marco Fontana.

Designing a cheaper, simpler prosthetic arm

Here’s a video detailing the concept of the new prosthetic arm design. (It features Adam Booher, IPT’s director of product development, and a member of a team of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign graduates who lead the company)

Most prosthetic arms are custom-made and cost thousands of dollars. But an Illinois-based non-profit, Illini Prosthetic Technologies (IPT), has come up with a much more affordable, pre-made alternative.

It’s operated by simple physical actions to control mechanical hooks that mimic a human hand.

The Open Socket prosthetic arm, as it’s called, is designed primarily for audiences in the developing world, which accounts for 80% of the globe’s 25 million amputees.

It costs a mere $100 dollars, comes in various sizes, and has steadily been gathering awards in recent months.

In August, one of IPT’s founders, Jonathan Naber, won a $10,000 Simon Fellowship for Noble Purpose from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Also in August, the company was named “Inventor of the Month” by software maker Autodesk.

And on November 8, the Open Socket design tied for second place honors in the competition for the 2011 James Dyson Award, a prestigious international design prize. The company has also received funding from the Clinton Global Initiative; Naber won a $30,000 Lemelson MIT-Illinois Student Prize for the prosthetic arm concept in 2010.

An amputee in Illinois lifts a table using a prototype of the Open Socket arm

IPT says their concept is inspired by the evolution of shoe- making from bespoke design businesses to mass-market manufacturing. 

The goal, of course, is to drive down the cost for resource-challenged amputees. So far, IPT has conducted user testing at Northwestern University in Illinois and in Zacapa, Guatemala. The company is currently working to bring the prosthetics to market.

Prosthetic Limb With An Embedded Smartphone Dock Built In

Trevor Prideaux was having trouble texting. Prideaux, who was born without his left forearm, used to have to balance his smartphone on his prosthetic arm or lay it on a flat surface to text, dial, or otherwise take advantage of the technology.


So with some help form the Exeter Mobility Center in Devon, UK, the 50-year-old Prideaux has become the first person to have a smartphone dock embedded in his prosthetic limb.

With some design help from Nokia and the prosthetics team at EMC, Prideaux’s Nokia C7 is now fixed within his prosthetic forearm (he went to Apple first hoping to mount an iPhone, but Cupertino declined to participate in his project).


He can now easily text by using his one hand, or field calls either by putting his prosthetic forearm up to his ear or by using speakerphone, leaving his biological limb free.

The very idea of it gets the idea mill churning. Right now, the prosthesis is a prosthesis and the phone is simply a phone, but the idea of integrating the two opens the door to some unique possibilities.

Aside from being able to record data on how the limb is used to help designers better customize the prosthesis to the person, the limb could also be augmented to make better use of the phone/computer.

Maybe some extra battery on board the limb? Some speakers for better speaker phone usage (and for the wearer’s listening pleasure, should he or she require some tunes).

Call it primitive cyborg tech with a lot of potential.

"Bionic" leg anticipates the wearer's moves

It was not a good day for 16 year old Craig Hutto. On June 27, 2005, wading in crystal clear waters off a near-deserted beach 50 miles south of Panama City, Craig was attacked by an 8-foot bull shark and lost his right leg from above the knee.

Today Hutto is a 6-foot 4-inch 23 year old studying Nursing at Middle Tennessee State. Fortunately for him, Nashville is also the home of Vanderbilt University where its Center for Intelligent Mechatronics has for seven years been developing an advanced prosthetic limb. They also happened to need a Lab Assistant to help them test it.

Professor Michael Goldfarb and his team are on the seventh iteration of a limb that combines a low weight (9lbs / 4 kg) aluminum alloy construction with embedded processors and powerful motorized knee and ankle joints.

A rechargeable battery provides enough power for three days or 8 miles (14 km). A wide array of sensors monitor the leg's position and movement and the on-board software tries to anticipate the wearer's needs when sitting, standing, walking etc.

A "stumble" routine for instance will try to lift the leg high to clear the obstacle and then plant it for stability.

This anticipation means the leg operates much more like a real limb which allows the wearer to walk with a normal gait, even up and down stairs or across uneven terrain. See the video below.

"Going up and down slopes is one of the hardest things to do with a conventional leg," said Hutto.

"So I have to be conscious of where I go because I can get very tired walking up and down slopes. But that won't be a problem with the powered leg because it goes up and down slopes almost like a natural leg."

Getting the Assistant position at Vanderbilt helped Hutto to pay his way through college but also allowed him to contribute to the development of an intelligent prosthetic limb that will greatly help many people that find themselves in his predicament.

The Vanderbuilt University Center for Intelligent Mechatronics is also developing an anthropomorphic prosthetic arm project and an advanced exoskeleton to aid in physical therapy.

U.S soldiers in Afghanistan develop simple prosthetic leg using local resources

While we've covered many developments in the field of prosthetics, such high-tech advances are beyond the reach of those in the developing world where the rates of amputation due to war are highest.

Now U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Afghanistan have developed a simple prototype prosthetic leg that can be constructed using local resources to allow the victims of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and land mines to get back on their feet quickly and cheaply.

Although he says he could have contacted a charity in the U.S. to get high-quality prosthetic limbs for a handful of victims near Forward Operating Base Pasab, Afghanistan, Dr. (Maj.) Brian Egloff, brigade surgeon, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, said it would only have been a temporary solution and so he and his colleagues set about finding an enduring design for a prosthetic leg.

The result was a prototype consisting of a simple cast attached to a metal rod with a flat hooked foot. The cast can be fitted in as little as a day and can be recast to accommodate the growth of the wearer. The metal rod and flat hook can be easily reproduced and allow the patient to walk more naturally.

An eight-year-old boy who lost both legs after stepping on a land mine and needed to be carried around on his father's back received the first prototype leg on June 26, 2011.

"It helped knowing that the leg was for a small 8-year-old boy who was happy all the time - despite his situation," said Warrant Officer Brian Terry, 710th Brigade Support Battalion, 3rd BCT, who constructed the prototype.

"This patient and people like him have no mobility whatsoever," added Egloff. "It's all about increasing mobility and allowing them to live a more productive lives."

Terry said the next step is for the Afghan doctors in this region to make their own prosthetics and to train them how to instruct victims on the use of the leg.

Implant could wirelessly relay brain signals to paralysed limbs

For a great number of people with paralysed limbs, the reason that they can't move the arm or leg in question is because the "move" command isn't able to reach from their brain to the limb.

This is often due to damage to the nervous system, or to the brain, although the limb itself is still perfectly functional ... so it could still move, if only there was a way of getting the signal to it.

Well, one might be on its way. Scientists at the University of Michigan have developed an implant known as the BioBolt, that wirelessly transmits neural signals from the brain to a computer. In the future, that computer could hopefully then relay them onto a formerly-paralised limb.

Neural implants do already exist, although previous attempts have required an access hole in the patient's skull to remain open while the device is in use - not all that practical for everyday use. The BioBolt, by contrast, would sit underneath the skin and within a hole in the skull, effectively sealing it.

True to its name, the device (which is about as wide as a dime) does indeed look like a bolt. It has a film of microcircuits on the bottom, which sit in contact with the brain.

Those microcircuits detect the firing of neurons, and based on the patterns of those firings, are able to recognise certain commands. Using the patient's skin as a conductor, the BioBolt then amplifies, filters and digitizes those signals, then transmits them to an external computer.

The incorporation of the conductive qualities of the skin is a key part of the technology, as this allows the implant to use relatively little power for its wireless transmissions.

Down the road, it is hoped that the computer could be replaced with wearable electronics, that might take the form of a watch or even a pair of earrings.

Those electronics could send the brain signals directly to the muscles of paralyzed limbs, stimulating them to perform the desired movements. The University of Michigan researchers, however, state that such a system is still years away.

Small security system keeps hackers away from your implant

MIT and UMass scientists have designed a transmitter that jams wireless signals sent to medical implants by unauthorized users.

Pacemakers, drug pumps, defibrillators… they all have wireless connections that allow doctors to monitor vital signs or revise treatments. But this also leaves them vulnerable to attack.

A hacker could, conceivably, kill someone by instructing the implant to deliver lethal doses of drugs or electricity.

No such attacks have been documented… but with millions of Americans carrying implantable medical devices (IMDs) in them, and about 300,000 people getting new ones every year around the world, it’s really not a system you want compromised.

So, researchers created a system that has a second transmitter to jam unauthorized signals directly eavesdropping in an implant’s operating frequency. And it only allows authorized users to communicate with it (diagrammed above).

A doctor-sanctioned device, which has access to the implant, would send encrypted instructions to the second transmitter, which then decodes and relays them.

They call this jamming transmitter, the “shield.” And it’s small enough to wear as a necklace or watch.

A few years ago, a team led by Kevin Fu of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst demonstrated they could overhear defibrillators’ signals, learning things like patient names and diagnoses.

So they started experimenting with implantable defibrillators obtained secondhand from Boston-area hospitals, and programmable off-the-shelf radio transmitters simulated the shield.

•  Without the shield, defibrillators obeyed commands from transmitters more than 40 feet away.
• With the shield, potential harm-doers as close as 8 inches couldn’t control or listen in on the devices.

The shield, and not the implant, would handle the encryption and authentication. “It’s hard to put [encryption] on these devices,” says project researcher Dina Katabi of MIT. “There are many of these devices that are really small, so for power reasons, for form-factor reasons, it might not make sense to put the [encryption] on them.”

Some other smart things about having an external shield:

• It would work with existing implantable devices.
• It’ll be easier to upgrade or replace without surgery.
• For emergency medical providers who need to communicate with an incapacitated patient’s implant, having to retrieve an encryption key could cause fatal delays. Whereas with this new security system, an emergency responder could just remove the shield.

The key is a new technique that allows the shield to simultaneously send and receive signals in the same frequency band. With ordinary wireless technology, the transmitted signal interferes with the received signal, making it unintelligible.

“Think of the jamming signal that we are creating as a secret key,” Katabi explains. “Everyone who doesn’t know the secret key just sees a garbage signal.” Because the shield knows the shape of its own jamming signal, however, it can, in effect, subtract it from the received signal.

The team will present the system [pdf] at the Association for Computing Machinery’s upcoming SIGCOMM conference in Toronto this August.

Via MIT News.

Artificial Limb misses the mark - Too easy!

An artificial arm programmed to work automatically disappointed some users in a study -- they said it was "too easy" -- U.S. researchers report.

University of Central Florida researchers thought the ease of using the program's automatic mode would be a huge hit, but they were surprised when most test participants preferred the manual mode-- which requires them to think several steps ahead and either physically type in instructions or verbally direct the arm with a series of precise commands -- a university release said.

"We focused so much on getting the technology right," Assistant Professor Aman Behal said. "We didn't expect this."

John Bricout, Behal's collaborator and associate dean at the University of Texas School of Social Work, said the study demonstrates how people want to be engaged -- but not overwhelmed -- by technology.

"If we're too challenged, we get angry and frustrated. But if we aren't challenged enough, we get bored," said Bricout, who has conducted extensive research on adapting technology for users with disabilities. "We all experience that. People with disabilities are no different."

The key is to design technology that can be individualized with ease, Behal said. Some patients will have more mobility than others, and they may prefer a design closer to the manual mode.

Though the automatic mode wasn't popular in the pilot study, it may be the best option for patients with more advanced disease and less mobility, he said.

Prosthetics: Polymer for artificial limbs to feel heat, cold, touch

Current prosthetics on the market have come a long way in looking natural, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re quite primitive: the best offer mechanical operation, but they’re missing a decidedly human touch: feeling.

That neurological aspect is vital to a full understanding of the world we live in. Two new studies are investigating how to bring feeling — neural stimulation — to prosthetic limbs.

Physicians at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons “Plastic Surgery 2009″ conference this week in Seattle announced the discovery of a polymer that conducts electricity like a wire and promotes the stimulation and growth of nerve fibers. The molecule — 3, 4-ethylenedioxythiophene, or “PEDOT” — is a promising first step in connecting to severed nerves and providing amputees with more neurological control of their prosthetics.

That translates to the ability to move fingers independently, apply an appropriate amount of pressure to objects (for example, to grab and lift a delicate item) and feel sensation.

In one study, plastic surgeons say they may have found a way to successfully grow new nerve fibers after they’ve been severed in an injury. The PEDOT polymer, along with other biologic and synthetic materials, was grafted onto the severed leg nerve of a rat. New nerve fibers grew and took over function from the severed nerve, reawakening muscles that were unable to be stimulated due to nerve injury.