Woman With Quadriplegia Feeds Herself Chocolate Using Mind-Controlled Robot Arm

In a study published in the online version of The Lancet, the researchers described the brain-computer interface (BCI) technology and training programs that allowed Ms. Scheuermann, 53, of Whitehall Borough in Pittsburgh, Pa. to intentionally move an arm, turn and bend a wrist, and close a hand for the first time in nine years.

Less than a year after she told the research team, “I’m going to feed myself chocolate before this is over,” Ms. Scheuermann savored its taste and announced as they applauded her feat, “One small nibble for a woman, one giant bite for BCI.”

“This is a spectacular leap toward greater function and independence for people who are unable to move their own arms,” agreed senior investigator Andrew B. Schwartz, Ph.D., professor, Department of Neurobiology, Pitt School of Medicine. “This technology, which interprets brain signals to guide a robot arm, has enormous potential that we are continuing to explore. Our study has shown us that it is technically feasible to restore ability; the participants have told us that BCI gives them hope for the future.”

In 1996, Ms. Scheuermann was a 36-year-old mother of two young children, running a successful business planning parties with murder-mystery themes and living in California when one day she noticed her legs seemed to drag behind her. Within two years, her legs and arms progressively weakened to the point that she required a wheelchair, as well as an attendant to assist her with dressing, eating, bathing and other day-to-day activities. After returning home to Pittsburgh in 1998 for support from her extended family, she was diagnosed with spinocerebellar degeneration, in which the connections between the brain and muscles slowly, and inexplicably, deteriorate.

Hacking the Human Brain: The Next Domain of Warfare

It’s been fashionable in military circles to talk about cyberspace as a “fifth domain” for warfare, along with land, space, air and sea. But there’s a sixth and arguably more important warfighting domain emerging: the human brain.

This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds with people seeking information. It’s about involuntarily penetrating, shaping, and coercing the mind in the ultimate realization of Clausewitz’s definition of war: compelling an adversary to submit to one’s will. And the most powerful tool in this war is brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, which connect the human brain to devices.

Current BCI work ranges from researchers compiling and interfacing neural data such as in the Human Conectome Project to work by scientists hardening the human brain against rubber hose cryptanalysis to technologists connecting the brain to robotic systems. While these groups are streamlining the BCI for either security or humanitarian purposes, the reality is that misapplication of such research and technology has significant implications for the future of warfare.

Where BCIs can provide opportunities for injured or disabled soldiers to remain on active duty post-injury, enable paralyzed individuals to use their brain to type, or allow amputees to feel using bionic limbs, they can also be exploited if hacked. BCIs can be used to manipulate … or kill.

Recently, security expert Barnaby Jack demonstrated the vulnerability of biotechnological systems by highlighting how easily pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) could be hacked, raising fears about the susceptibility of even life-saving biotechnological implants. This vulnerability could easily be extended to biotechnologies that connect directly to the brain, such as vagus nerve stimulation or deep-brain stimulation.

Outside the body, recent experiments have proven that the brain can control and maneuver quadcopter drones and metal exoskeletons. How long before we harness the power of mind-controlled weaponized drones – or use BCIs to enhance the power, efficiency, and sheer lethality of our soldiers?

Given that military research arms such as the United States’ DARPA are investing in understanding complex neural processes and enhanced threat detection through BCI scan for P300 responses, it seems the marriage between neuroscience and military systems will fundamentally alter the future of conflict.

And it is here that military researchers need to harden the systems that enable military application of BCIs. We need to prevent BCIs from being disrupted or manipulated, and safeguard against the ability of the enemy to hack an individual’s brain.

The possibilities for damage, destruction, and chaos are very real. This could include manipulating a soldier’s BCI during conflict so that s/he were forced to pull the gun trigger on friendlies, install malicious code in his own secure computer system, call in inaccurate coordinates for an air strike, or divulge state secrets to the enemy seemingly voluntarily. Whether an insider has fallen victim to BCI hacking and exploits a system from within, or an external threat is compelled to initiate a physical attack on hard and soft targets, the results would present major complications: in attribution, effectiveness of kinetic operations, and stability of geopolitical relations.

Like every other domain of warfare, the mind as the sixth domain is neither isolated nor removed from other domains; coordinated attacks across all domains will continue to be the norm. It’s just that military and defense thinkers now need to account for the subtleties of the human mind … and our increasing reliance upon the brain-computer interface.

Regardless of how it will look, though, the threat is real and not as far away as we would like – especially now that researchers just discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the brain.

Follow the Eyes: Head-Mounted Cameras Could Help Robots Understand Social Interactions

What is everyone looking at? It’s a common question in social settings because the answer identifies something of interest, or helps delineate social groupings. Those insights someday will be essential for robots designed to interact with humans, so researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have developed a method for detecting where people’s gazes intersect.

The researchers tested the method using groups of people with head-mounted video cameras. By noting where their gazes converged in three-dimensional space, the researchers could determine if they were listening to a single speaker, interacting as a group, or even following the bouncing ball in a ping-pong game.

The system thus uses crowdsourcing to provide subjective information about social groups that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for a robot to ascertain.

The researchers’ algorithm for determining “social saliency” could ultimately be used to evaluate a variety of social cues, such as the expressions on people’s faces or body movements, or data from other types of visual or audio sensors.

"This really is just a first step toward analyzing the social signals of people," said Hyun Soo Park, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, who worked on the project with Yaser Sheikh, assistant research professor of robotics, and Eakta Jain of Texas Instruments, who was awarded a Ph.D. in robotics last spring. "In the future, robots will need to interact organically with people and to do so they must understand their social environment, not just their physical environment."

Japanese researchers build robot with most humanlike muscle-skeleton structure yet

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have taken another step towards creating a robot with a faithfully recreated human skeleton and muscle structure. Called Kenshiro, the robot has been demonstrated at the recent Humanoids 2012 conference in Osaka, Japan.

Exoskeleton suit gives man chance to walk again

Cutting edge technology has a Darien man taking miraculous steps.

He was paralyzed after he was struck by a car while riding his bike, training for an ironman four years ago.

Mike Loura was beaming as he was walking and showcasing this amazing robotic exoskeleton technology. He was doing something he never imagined he’d be able to do again.

"Ever since the accident all the doctors said you’re never going to walk again," Loura said.

However, the husband and father of two girls is walking again. Thursday was day 15, the day Loura strapped on the wearable robot, a breakthrough technology, but it’s the first time he’s taking steps for others to see.

"Every time I take a step I kinda have to balance myself in a certain position for the machine to know that it’s ready to take the next step," said Loura.

"It has an exoskeleton system with battery powered motor that allows someone who can’t feel and can’t move," said Dr. David Rosenblum, "who’s paralyzed, the ability to go from sit to stand to actually taking steps."

Dr. Rosenblum is the medical director of Rehabilitation at Gaylord Specialty Healthcare, the only center in Connecticut to offer the Ekso Bionics’ Robotic Exoskeleton technology to patients with spinal chord injuries.

"We’re using it as a tool to work on balance to get someone up and moving," said Dr. Rosenblum. "From a wellness perspective to improve their quality of life."

Electronic brain hacks are turning insects into robotic helpers

We’re a long way from directly controlling human minds remotely, but recent years have seen a string of breakthroughs in hacking the minds of insects. Insect brains are probably the simplest interesting brains, as insects can perform a range of tasks (flying, smelling, carrying, etc.) with brains that have numbers of neurons orders of magnitude less than those in complex vertebrates. A fruit fly has around 100,00 neurons, compared to 85 billion in humans.

So at the conjunction of neuroscience and robotics lie insects — their tiny brains still too complex to model completely, but offering an easy way into modelling certain parts of the brain. It’s how engineers from Sheffield and Sussex universities can claim they’re preparing to upload the smell and sight parts of a bee’s brain into a bee-like flying robot, enmeshed with human-created software to create a completely new “brain”.

The hope is that the bee-bot could fly in areas that other robots can’t fit, like a collapsed building. And it makes sense to use nature’s own smell modules instead of developing new ones — their combination of efficiency in size and operation is so far unmatched by anything synthetic. A bee-bot could smell out explosives in a warzone, or drugs in shipping containers, or any of many other myriad uses, and actually go investigate. They can even be used as little spies. Who would notice a fly sitting on the wall of a meeting room?

A lot of research in the area of bug brains is being funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon agency which seeks out new technologies for military use. It’s not hard to imagine a future where drones are grown on farms, with extra controls implanted at the larval stage — a process developed by bionic researchers at North Carolina State University.

Thought-controlled prosthesis is changing the lives of amputees

The world’s first implantable robotic arm controlled by thoughts is being developed by Chalmers researcher Max Ortiz Catalan. The first operations on patients will take place this winter.

“Our technology helps amputees to control an artificial limb, in much the same way as their own biological hand or arm, via the person’s own nerves and remaining muscles. This is a huge benefit for both the individual and to society”, says Max Ortiz Catalan, industrial doctoral student at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

Ever since the 1960s, amputees have been able to use prostheses controlled by electrical impulses in the muscles. Unfortunately, however, the technology for controlling these prostheses has not evolved to any great extent since then. For example, very advanced electric hand prostheses are available, but their functionality is limited because they are difficult to control.

“All movements must by pre-programmed”, says Max Ortiz Catalan. “It’s like having a Ferrari without a steering wheel. Therefore, we have developed a new bidirectional interface with the human body, together with a natural and intuitive control system.”

Today’s standard socket prostheses, which are attached to the body using a socket tightly fitted on the amputated stump, are so uncomfortable and limiting that only 50 percent of arm amputees are willing to use one at all.
This research project is using the world-famous Brånemark titanium implant instead (OPRA Implant System), which anchors the prosthesis directly to the skeleton through what is known as osseointegration.

“Osseointegration is vital to our success. We are now using the technology to gain permanent access to the electrodes that we will attach directly to nerves and muscles”, says Max Ortiz Catalan.

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Will machines kill mankind?

Academics at Cambridge University are pondering the risk to humanity from super-intelligent technology which could “threaten our own existence.”

Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, said: “In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology.”

Professor Price is planning to launch a research centre next year looking into the danger, teaming up with Cambridge professor of cosmology and astrophysics Martin Rees and Jann Tallinn, one of the founders of Skype.

He wants to bring more attention to a future in which mankind might be at the mercy of “machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don’t include us.”

The group won’t be the first people to ponder such a future, which has featured in science fiction since the dawn of the computer age, perhaps most famously with HAL-  the malevolent computer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oddyssey- and most recently in I, Robot, starring Will Smith.

Acknowledging that many people believe his concerns are far-fetched, Professor Price said: “It tends to be regarded as a flaky concern, but given that we don’t know how serious the risks are, that we don’t know the time scale, dismissing the concerns is dangerous.”

He said that advanced technology could be a threat when computers start to direct resources towards their own goals, at the expense of human concerns like environmental sustainability.

He compared the risk to the way humans have threatened the survival of other animals by spreading across the planet and using up natural resources that other animals depend upon.

HEARBO Robot Has Superhearing

We live in a world of sounds, full of beautiful music, birds chirping, and the voices of our friends. It’s a rich cacophony, with blaring beeps, accented alarms, and knock-knock jokes. The sound of a door opening can alert us to a friend’s arrival, and a door slamming can alert us to an impending argument.

HEARBO (HEAR-ing roBOt) is a robot developed at Honda Research Institute–Japan (HRI-JP), and its job is to understand this world of sound, in a field called Computational Auditory Scene Analysis.