We Live In The Future

A reminder that we are living in the future. Curated by MSG, Matt, & Ivan Share your own reminders

[themedicalstate]

Man Successfully Controls 2 Prosthetic Arms With Just His Thoughts

A Colorado man can now control two prosthetic arms with his mind.

Les Baugh lost both his arms in an electrical accident 40 years ago. But with the help Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), he’s able to control a set of Modular Prosthetic Limbs with his nerves. All he has to do is think about moving his arms, and they move.

Nothing is permanently attached to him; Baugh wears what is called a “socket,” which connects the prosthetics to his body. The researchers measured the way his muscles and nerves react when Baugh thinks about moving his arms. Then, when he thinks about moving his arms and hands in a certain way, the prosthetics move.

Baugh is the first bilateral shoulder-level amputee to wear two Modular Prosthetic Limbs at once, according to the researchers. He’s spending a lot of time practicing different tasks.

"Maybe I’ll be able to — for once — be able to put change in a pop machine and get the pop out of it," Baugh said in a video about the breakthrough. "Simple things like that that most people never think of." He can only use the arms in the lab for now, but someday he will have two of his own.

"I think we’re just getting started at this point. It’s like the early days of the Internet," Mike McLoughlin, the program manager at Johns Hopkins’ Revolutionizing Prosthetics, said in the video. “There’s just a tremendous amount of potential ahead of us, and we just started down this road. I think the next five, 10 years are going to bring some really phenomenal advancements.”

Check out a video of Baugh and the researchers here

[weliveinthefuture]

Humans just got a step closer to being able to think a message into someone else's brain on the other side of the world: in a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of researchers has successfully achieved brain-to-brain transmission of information between humans.

Brain-to-brain verbal communication in humans achieved for the first time

[weliveinthefuture]

[weliveinthefuture]

It’s already pretty crazy what they’re able to do now. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re living in the future. I know just by looking at history that it’s only going to get better.

Ian Burkhart, the first paralyzed man to move his own hand with his thoughts (and a virtual spinal cord).

[weliveinthefuture]

The Future of Customized Fab-Grade 3D Printing

[weliveinthefuture]

Iranian school teacher builds a robot to teach children prayers

[wildcat2030]

Paralyzed woman walks again with 3D-printed robotic exoskeleton - 3D Systems, in collaboration with Ekso Bionics, has created a 3D-printed robotic exoskeleton that has restored the ability to walk in a woman paralyzed from the waist down. The Ekso-Suit was trialled and demonstrated by Amanda Boxtel, who was told by her doctor that she’d never walk again after a skiing accident in 1992. (via Paralyzed woman walks again with 3D-printed robotic exoskeleton)

[weliveinthefuture]

New laser-printed material based on the structure of bone is lighter than water, as strong as steel

[humanoidhistory]

FUJI FLYER — Ingenious Swiss daredevil Yves “Jetman” Rossy rockets around Mount Fuji in Japan, demonstrating the eight-foot-wide, jet-powered, carbon-fiber wing machine he invented to achieve his dream of flying. Mission accomplished, me thinks. Watch the video here.

[we-are-star-stuff]

A blind british man has had his sight restored after pioneering surgery that involved implanting one of his teeth into his eye.

Ian Tibbetts, 43, who first damaged his eye in an industrial accident when scrap metal ripped his cornea in six places, had his sight restored by the radical operation, chronicled in the new BBC documentary The Day I Got My Sight Back.

The surgery allowed Mr Tibbetts to see his four-year-old twin sons, Callum and Ryan, for the first time, a moment he describes as “ecstasy”.

The procedure, called osteo-odonto-keratoprothesis, or OOKP, was conducted by ophthalmic surgeon Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton, Sussex. Mr Tibbetts and his wife Alex agreed to the revolutionary surgery after all other options had failed, leaving Mr Tibbetts depressed and out of work.

The complex surgery is a two-part procedure. First, the tooth and part of the jaw are removed, and a lens is inserted into the tooth using a drill. The tooth and lens are then implanted under the eye socket. After a few months, once the tooth has grown tissues and developed a blood supply, comes the second step: part of the cornea is sliced open and removed and the tooth is stitched into the eye socket. Since the tooth is the patient’s own tissue, the body does not reject it.

"The tooth is like a picture frame which holds this tiny plastic lens" documentary maker Sally George told the BBC.

After the bandages came off, Mr Tibbetts’ sight gradually returned, and he saw his sons’ faces for the first time.

"I just cried, gave them a big hug and a kiss. They were totally different than what I’d pictured in my mind" he said.

"They were just shapes. I couldn’t make them out. I had to actually learn to tell them apart by their voices. I could tell whichever one it was by the way they spoke and sometimes by how quickly they moved. I had a picture in my head of what they looked like but they were better. I’m a bit biased there."

Now, Mr Tibbetts’ vision is now about 40 per cent, and although at first strangers stared at his new eye - which is pink, with a black pupil, he no longer is bothered by the attention.

[via]

[weliveinthefuture]

He had been blind for twelve years.

[weliveinthefuture]

Re-purposed welding robot can forge any painting it’s shown

[thegraphicdivine-deactivated201]

[tomemrich]

Cortex: The 3D-Printed Cast

After many centuries of splints and cumbersome plaster casts that have been the itchy and smelly bane of millions of children, adults and the aged alike the world over, we at last bring fracture support into the 21st century. The Cortex exoskeletal cast provides a highly technical and trauma zone localized support system that is fully ventilated, super light, shower friendly, hygienic, recyclable and stylish. The cortex cast utilizes the x-ray and 3d scan of a patient with a fracture and generates a 3d model in relation to the point of fracture.

By Jake Evill

[prostheticknowledge]

[theantidote-deactivated20141122]

Prototype Real / Digital Info Interface System

Using projection and gestures to create interactive relationship with information - video embedded below:

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word.

“We think paper and many other objects could be manipulated by touching them, as with a touchscreen. This system doesn’t use any special hardware; it consists of just a device like an ordinary webcam, plus a commercial projector. Its capabilities are achieved by image processing technology.”

Using this technology, information can be imported from a document as data, by selecting the necessary parts with your finger.

More at DigInfo here

RELATED: This is very similar to a concept developed in 1991 called ‘The Digital Desk’ [link]

(via prostheticknowledge:)

[toddsampson]

Graphene is Amazing

Graphene has been found to be a supercapacitor; a nearly unbreakable touchscreen; and now an uber-efficient filter for creating cheap, clean water from seawater.  This is pretty amazing considering graphene was only discovered about 10 years ago; and its discovery didn’t win the Nobel Prize until 2010.

Now that you can make Graphene using a standard DVD drive and etch designs that act as electrodes with a CO2 laser things are going to get really interesting.

[theverge]

Fujitsu’s futuristic cane does so much more than help you walk

We’d always thought the cane was a relatively mature technology — it’s very good at helping you walk around, and really can’t be improved. We were wrong. Hidden against a bright white wall inside Fujitsu’s booth at MWC was the Next Generation Cane, which is more or less what you’d get if you brought a bunch of science fiction writers into a room and asked them how to make Cane 2.0. 

[weliveinthefuture]

This is impressive. Click through for video of a cane that can guide its owner to a destination, monitor heart rate, and let family members know where it is.

[weliveinthefuture]

MYO - Wearable Gesture Control from Thalmic Labs

[jstn]

Thinking about getting implanted collamer lenses. They insert a rolled up lens through a tiny incision behind your iris and it actually unfolds inside your eye, without cutting or reshaping your cornea like LASIK.

[weliveinthefuture]

"The ICL can be removed and replaced if vision changes substantially after the procedure."