Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine a patient controlling the movement of his or her prosthetic limb simply by thinking of commands. It may sound like science fiction but will soon become reality thanks to the EU-funded DeTOP project. A consortium of engineers, neuroscientists and clinicians has made great strides in further developing the technology behind more natural and functional prostheses.

The team uses an osseointegrated human-machine gateway (OHMG) to develop a physical link between a person and a robotic prosthesis. A patient in Sweden was the first recipient of titanium implants with the OHMG system. The OHMG is directly fitted to bones in the user’s arms, from which electrodes to nerves and muscle extract signals to control a robotic hand and provide tactile sensations. According to a news item by “News Medical,” the patient will begin using a training prosthesis in the next few months before being fitted with the new artificial hand developed by DeTOP partners. This will help the team evaluate the entire system, including the implanted interface, electronics, as well as wrist and hand functions. Motor coordination and grip strength will also be assessed during the tests.

From interpreting CT scans to diagnosing eye disease, artificial intelligence is taking on medical tasks once reserved for only highly trained medical specialists — and in many cases outperforming its human counterparts.

Now AI is starting to show up in intensive care units, where hospitals treat their sickest patients. Doctors who have used the new systems say AI may be better at responding to the vast trove of medical data collected from ICU patients — and may help save patients who are teetering between life and death.

Right now, the robot is busy with the pre-launch preparations. August 22, F-850 will be launched to the ISS aboard the Soyuz MS-14 unmanned spacecraft. However, the humanoid robot won’t be staying on board long, after a ten-day mission F-850 is set to leave the station and return to Earth.

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Research on robotic prostheses is coming along in leaps and bounds, but one hurdle is proving quite tricky to overcome: a sense of touch. Among other things, this sense helps us control our grip strength — which is vitally important when it comes to having fine motor control for handling delicate objects.

Enter a new upgrade for the LUKE Arm — named for Luke Skywalker, the Star Wars hero with a robotic hand. Prototype versions of this robotic prosthesis can be linked up to the wearer’s nerves.

Continue reading “This Robotic Arm Inspired by Luke Skywalker Has Allowed an Amputee to Feel Again” »

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Though some computer engineers claim to know what human consciousness is, many neuroscientists say that we’re nowhere close to understanding what it is — or its source.

In this video, bestselling author Douglas Rushkoff gives the “transhumanist myth” — the belief that A.I. will replace humans — a reality check. Is it hubristic to upload people’s minds to silicon chips, or re-create their consciousness with algorithms, when we still know so little about what it means to be human?

Continue reading “Why ‘upgrading’ humanity is a transhumanist myth” »

It’s not every day that an 18-year-old college student catches the eye of the computing world, but when Ewin Tang took aim at recommendation algorithms similar to those commonly used by the likes of Amazon and Netflix, the University of Texas at Austin mathematics and computer science undergraduate blew up an established belief: that classical computers cannot perform these types of calculations at the speed of quantum computers.

In a July 2018 paper, which Tang wrote for a senior honors thesis under the supervision of computer science professor Scott Aaronson, a leading researcher in quantum computing algorithms, she discovered an algorithm that showed classical computers can indeed tackle predictive recommendations at a speed previously thought possible only with quantum computers. “I actually set out to demonstrate that quantum machine learning algorithms are faster,” she explains. “But, along the way, I realized this was not the case.”

Figure. Ewin Tang set out to show that quantum machine learning algorithms are faster than classical algorithms, “but … I realized this was not the case.”

Analytical chemists have been working to develop high-functioning robotic smelling devices to detect victims of everything from human trafficking to natural disasters. But does it work?

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In the last video in this series, we started on a quest to clear up the misconceptions between artificial intelligence and machine learning, beginning with discussing supervised learning, an essential foundational building block in understanding the modern field of machine learning.

Continue reading “What is Machine Learning (Unsupervised Learning) — Part 2” »

Can robotics transform the medical industry? While there are plenty of medicine-focused robotics apps in development, the long-term outlook for their use remains to be seen.