Ingestible, Implantable, Or Intimate Contact: How Will You Take Your Microscale Body Sensors? Computer chips and silicon micromachines are ready for your body.
It’s time to decide how you’ll take them: implantable, ingestible, or intimate contact. Every flavor now exists. Some have FDA approval and some are seeking it. Others are moving quickly out of the research lab stage. With the round one Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize entries due in one year, we’re soon to see a heavy dose of sensors tied to the mobile wireless health revolution. With these sensors comes a heavy dose of information about your health, data about what medication you are taking and when you took it. Scientists-create-sensor-as-sensitive-as-real-skin/ [Source: Georgia Tech] While prosthetic limbs continue to improve, tactile feedback is one feature that many are keen to incorporate into the prosthetics but it remains a very difficult technology to develop.
But now scientists have developed a new device so packed with sensors it is about as sensitive as human skin. Just as Moore’s Law continues to benefit the integrated circuit, packing ever more sensors into a smaller area will allow such devices to one day be built into everything we touch. Some areas of our skin, like the lips and fingertips, are more sensitive to the touch because of a greater density of receptors that translate mechanical force into neuronal signals.
The sensory device built by scientists at Georgia Tech is a new kind of transistor that converts mechanical force into electricity. A paper featuring the device was published recently in Science. Samsung’s (Very) Early Attempts At Thought-Controlled Mobile Devices. Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones are controlled by touch, gesture, eye movement—and your mind.
Well, not exactly that last bit. At least, not yet. Perhaps half in the name of science, half for publicity, Samsung’s teamed up with Roozbeh Jafari (University of Texas, Dallas assistant professor and wearable computing expert) to translate thoughts into common computing tasks using an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap. The EEG cap fits snugly onto the users’ head and uses electrodes to pick up the brain’s faint electrical signals.
These signals fall into repetitive patterns when confronted with repetitive visual stimuli like blinking icons. In an MIT Technology Review video, a user sporting an EEG cap is shown manipulating a tablet—launching a music application, selecting the artist, and pausing and resuming music. Intendix, The Brain Computer Interface Goes Commercial (video) Intendix is the first thought-to-type system you can buy that's ready to use out of the package.
BCI is going commercial. How Does Stephen Hawking Talk? (video) There are few scientists that have captivated the public interest as much as renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking.
His theories about blackholes, his book A Brief History of Time, and his appearances on the Simpsons and Star Trek have made him an international icon for intelligence and science. And although it seems to make little difference to his colleagues or friends, there’s no denying that part of Hawking’s fame comes from the manner in which he communicates: a computer generated voice. Struck by motor neuron disease (ALS/Lou Gehrig’s), the brilliant professor has lost most of his muscle control, and a necessary tracheotomy has removed his ability to speak on his own. If Hawking had been born just a few decades earlier, the world would have lost all access to his insightful mind. Instead, custom devices (and commercially available software) have given him the means to express his revolutionary theories in physics. Wireless Device Reads Brain Signals, Turns them into Speech (Video)
Implanted electrodes in the speech center of the brain can communicate wirelessy via FM transmission with a computer.
This allows a computer to inteprete brain activity into sounds using a speech synthesizer. Remarkable news keeps coming for those who are trapped in their own bodies. People with locked-in syndrome, a condition where a healthy mind is unable to express itself due to brain damage, are slowly being opened up through direct contact with their motor neurons in the brain. Frank Guenther at Boston University's Speech Lab has teamed up with Phillip Kennedy at Neural Signals to measure activity in the speech centers of the brain through implanted electrodes. The Future of Gaming — It May All Be in Your Head. Gaming as a hobby evokes images of lethargic teenagers huddled over their controllers, submerged in their couch surrounded by candy bar wrappers.
This image should soon hit the reset button since a more exciting version of gaming is coming. It’s called neurogaming, and it’s riding on the heels of some exponential technologies that are converging on each other. Many of these were on display recently in San Francisco at the NeuroGaming Conference and Expo; a first-of-its-kind conference whose existence alone signals an inflection point in the industry. Conference founder, Zack Lynch, summarized neurogaming to those of us in attendance as the interface, “where the mind and body meet to play games.” Driven by explosive growth in computer processing, affordable sensors, and new haptic sensation technology, neurogame designers have entirely new toolkits to craft an immersive experience that simulates our waking life.