The Walk Again Project

Over the past decade, neuroscientists at the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering (DUCN) have developed the field of brain-machine interface (BMI) into one of the most exciting—and promising—areas of basic and applied research in modern neuroscience. By creating a way to link living brain tissue to a variety of artificial tools, BMIs have made it possible for non-human primates to use the electrical activity produced by hundreds of neurons, located in multiple regions of their brains, to directly control the movements of a variety of robotic devices, including prosthetic arms and legs.

As a result, BMI research raises the hope that in the not-too-distant future, patients suffering from a variety of neurological disorders that lead to devastating levels of paralysis may be able to recover their mobility by harnessing their own brain impulses to directly control sophisticated neuroprostheses.
The Walk Again Project, an international consortium of leading research centers around the world represents a new paradigm for scientific collaboration among the world’s academic institutions, bringing together a global network of scientific and technological experts, distributed among all the continents, to achieve a key humanitarian goal.

The project’s central goal is to develop and implement the first BMI capable of restoring full mobility to patients suffering from a severe degree of paralysis. This lofty goal will be achieved by building a neuroprosthetic device that uses a BMI as its core, allowing the patients to capture and use their own voluntary brain activity to control the movements of a full-body prosthetic device. This “wearable robot,” also known as an “exoskeleton,” will be designed to sustain and carry the patient’s body according to his or her mental will.

In addition to proposing to develop new technologies that aim at improving the quality of life of millions of people worldwide, the Walk Again Project also innovates by creating a complete new paradigm for global scientific collaboration among leading academic institutions worldwide. According to this model, a worldwide network of leading scientific and technological experts, distributed among all the continents, come together to participate in a major, non-profit effort to make a fellow human being walk again, based on their collective expertise. These world renowned scholars will contribute key intellectual assets as well as provide a base for continued fundraising capitalization of the project, setting clear goals to establish fundamental advances toward restoring full mobility for patients in need.

Walk again Project Homepage

Grow a new eye

“I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic artificial eye. The intraocular installation of an eye-cam will substitute for the field of vision of my left eye that I lost in 2005 from a car accident.”
So says Tanya Marie Vlach, who lost her left eye in a car accident. After she received “hundreds of international engineering proposals, support from my  one-eyed community, and thousands of media inquiries.I’ve been plotting new strategies to tell my story, both my personal one and the one of my sci-fi alter ego, into a transmedia platform, which will include: a graphic novel, an experimental documentary, a web series, a game, and a live performance.”
And she wants to build a “bionic camera eye” as a Kickstarter project,  described here. (Also see Grow a new eye by Tanya Vlach.)
Specifications:

• SD at least, 720p HD at best
• MPEG-4 / H.264 Recording
• Built in Wireless Transmitter
• Bluetooth Wireless Method
• Remote Trigger
• Mini A/V out
• Firewire / USB / Mini HDMI
• Optical 3X
• Inductors: (Power Source)

Wish List:

• Wireless
• Sensors that respond to blinking enabling camera to take still photos, zoom, focus, and turn on and off.
• Dilating pupil with change of light.
• Infrared / Ultraviolet
• Geo-tagging
• Facial Recognition
• Water Tight
• Verisimilitude

Sounds like a great project. Thanks to Ehren Wells for the tip!


Grow a new eye from Tanya Vlach on Vimeo.


Original article  by July 11, 2011 by Amara D. Angelica
 

Boosting neuron growth may lead to drugs that improve cognition and mood

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have developed a new way to stimulate neurogenesis (neuron production) in the adult mouse brain, demonstrating that neurons acquired in the brain’s hippo campus during adulthood improve certain cognitive functions.

The researchers boosted the number of neurons in the hippo campus, an area of the brain involved in memory and mood, and tested the mice in both learning and mood-related tasks, looking for changes in behavior.
They found specific effects on learning tasks that involve a process called pattern separation, which is the ability to distinguish between similar places, events, and experiences. Pattern separation is important for learning, since it helps determine whether something is familiar or novel.

Pattern separation may also be important for anxiety disorders, including post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and panic disorder. People with PTSD, say the researchers, have a more generalized fear response, so that when they are placed in a situation that reminds them of even one aspect of their trauma, they frequently have a full fear response.

The researchers say that the genetic strategy used to stimulate neurogenesis in their experiments can be mimicked

Two books for Radical Life Extension"The Scientific Conquest of Death" and "Ending Aging"

In "The Scientific Conquest of Death
" written by the Immortality Institute they surmize that immortality will become an eventuality and a reality not some fictional sci-fi fanboy wetdream.

The book is divided into two areas. The first being the Scientific Essays from well-known authors like Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey which outline potential solutions to the problem of aging, and why it will eventually happen. Also they speculate on when it may occur.

The second half is about the Perspectives or philosophic arguments why becoming immortal is a worthy goal.

Overall its a great introduction to radical life extension ideas and philosophies. My only criticism of the book is that I would have preferred it to be a little more technical and less general but I guess its trying to get the word out to as broad an audience as possible which is definitely a worthy goal.

A second book I would recommend is Aubrey De Grey's "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
" which goes a little more into the technical side which I personally love but may put some lay-people to sleep.

First by breaking down exactly what happens to your body when its aging and the processes behind it and then by comparing our body to a machine in which parts can systematically can be repaired piece by piece as damage is accumulated throughout our its and our lives. 

Lastly he goes into his recommendations for how the R&D community could and should go about redirecting its resources by solving the problem of age related diseases.

In all its easily one of my top 3 books I've read over the last few years.


The Scientific Conquest of Death

Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime



Immortality Institutes Homepage

Aubrey De Grey SENS Foundation

One step closer to an artificial nerve cell

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet and Linköping University (Sweden) are well on the way to creating the first artificial nerve cell that can communicate specifically with nerve cells in the body using neurotransmitters. The technology has been published in an article in Nature Materials.

The methods that are currently used to stimulate nerve signals in the nervous system are based on electrical stimulation. Examples of this are cochlear implants, which are surgically inserted into the cochlea in the inner ear, and electrodes that are used directly in the brain. One problem with this method is that all cell types in the vicinity of the electrode are activated, which gives undesired effects.

Scientists have now used an electrically conducting plastic to create a new type of "delivery electrode" that instead releases the neurotransmitters that brain cells use to communicate naturally. The advantage of this is that only neighbouring cells that have receptors for the specific neurotransmitter, and that are thus sensitive to this substance, will be activated.

The scientists demonstrate in the article in Nature Materials that the delivery electrode can be used to control the hearing function in the brains of guinea pigs.

"The ability to deliver exact doses of neurotransmitters opens completely new possibilities for correcting the signalling systems that are faulty in a number of neurological disease conditions", says Professor Agneta Richter-Dahlfors who has led the work, together with Professor Barbara Canlon.

The scientists intend to continue with the development of a small unit that can be implanted into the body. It will be possible to program the unit such that the release of neurotransmitters takes place as often or as seldom as required in order to treat the individual patient. Research projects that are already under way are targeted towards hearing, epilepsy and Parkinson's disease.

The research is being carried out in collaboration between the research groups of Professor Agneta Richter-Dahlfors and Professor Barbara Canlon, together with Professor Magnus Berggren's group at Linköping University. The work falls under the auspices of the Center of Excellence in Organic Bioelectronics, financed by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and led by Magnus Berggren and Agneta Richter-Dahlfors.

More information:

Daniel T. Simon, Sindhulakshmi Kurup, Karin C. Larsson, Ryusuke Hori, Klas Tybrandt, Michel Goiny, Edwin W. H. Jager, Magnus Berggren, Barbara Canlon and Agneta Richter-Dahlfors
Organic electronics for precise delivery of neurotransmitters to modulate mammalian sensory function
Nature Materials, Advance Online Publication, 5 June 2009.

Provided by Karolinska Institutet

Understanding A Cell's Split Personality Aids Synthetic Circuits

In this colony, the bacteria lighting up in green are those being "turned on," while those in red remain "off."

As scientists work toward making genetically altered bacteria create living "circuits" to produce a myriad of useful proteins and chemicals, they have logically assumed that the single-celled organisms would always respond to an external command in the same way.

Alas, some bacteria apparently have an individualistic streak that makes them zig when the others zag.

A new set of experiments by Duke University bioengineers has uncovered the existence of "bistability," in which an individual cell has the potential to live in either of two states, depending on which state it was in when stimulated.

Taking into account the effects of this phenomenon should greatly enhance the future efficiency of synthetic circuits, said biomedical engineer Lingchong You of Duke's Pratt School of Engineering and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy.

In principle, re-programmed bacteria in a synthetic circuit can be useful for producing proteins, enzymes or chemicals in a coordinated way, or even delivering different types of drugs or selectively killing cancer cells, the scientists said.

Researchers in this new field of synthetic biology "program" populations of genetically altered bacteria to direct their actions in much the same way that a computer program directs a computer. In this analogy, the genetic alteration is the software, the cell the computer. The Duke researchers found that not only does the software drive the computer's actions, but the computer in turn influences the running of the software.

"In the past, synthetic biologists have often assumed that the components of the circuit would act in a predictable fashion every time and that the cells carrying the circuit would just serve as a passive reactor," You said. "In essence, they have taken a circuit-centric view for the design and optimization process. This notion is helpful in making the design process more convenient."

But it's not that simple, say You and his graduate student Cheemeng Tan, who published the results of their latest experiments early online in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

"We found that there can be unintended consequences that haven't been appreciated before," said You. "In a population of identical cells, some can act one way while others act in another. However, this process appears to occur in a predictable manner, which allows us to take into account this effect when we design circuits."

Bistability is not unique to biology. In electrical engineering, for example, bistability describes the functioning of a toggle switch, a hinged switch that can assume either one of two positions – on or off.

"The prevailing wisdom underestimated the complexity of these synthetic circuits by assuming that the genetic changes would not affect the operation of the cell itself, as if the cell were a passive chassis," said Tan. "The expression of the genetic alteration can drastically impact the cell, and therefore the circuit.

"We now know that when the circuit is activated, it affects the cell, which in turn acts as an additional feedback loop influencing the circuit," Tan said. "The consequences of this interplay have been theorized but not demonstrated experimentally."

The scientists conducted their experiments using a genetically altered colony of the bacteria Escherichia coli (E.coli) in a simple synthetic circuit. When the colony of bacteria was stimulated by external cues, some of the cells went to the "on" position and grew more slowly, while the rest went to the "off" position and grew faster.

"It is as if the colony received the command not to expand too fast when the circuit is on," Tan explained. "Now that we know that this occurs, we used computer modeling to predict how many of the cells will go to the 'on' or 'off' state, which turns out to be consistent with experimental measurements"

The experiments were supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and a David and Lucille Packard Fellowship. Duke's Philippe Marguet was also a member of the research team.

---

Adapted from materials provided by Duke University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Go to hospital to see computing's future

Innovation is our regular column that highlights emerging technological ideas and where they may lead.

If you want to know how people will interact with machines in the future, head for a hospital.

That's the impression I got from a new report about the future of human-computer interaction from IT analysts Gartner, based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Gartner's now-classic chart, shown right, shows the rollercoaster of expectations ridden by new technologies: rocketing from obscurity to a peak of overblown hype, then falling into a "trough of disillusionment" before finally becoming mainstream as a tech's true worth is found.

Enlightened climb

Speech recognition, currently climbing the slope of enlightenment towards the plateau of productivity, is a good example of how healthcare helps new technology.

Some homeworkers are now hooked, and the technology is appearing in cellphones and voicemail systems. But its maturity owes as much to the rehabilitation industry as the software industry.

Today's true power users of voice recognition are people who are physically unable to use keyboard or mouse. For them, it is as much a medical device as an office aide. They have not only supported public and private research over the years, but also provided a market for the technology when it was far from perfect.

Guided by eyes

Eye tracking, climbing the hype peak as you read this, is also an everyday reality for many people for whom conventional interfaces are difficult.

Without that spur to innovation it is unlikely that more mainstream uses for eye tracking, from making computer games spring baddies when you least expect it to having billboards track passers by, would be so advanced.

Slumped at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment, virtual reality seems too familiar an idea to be labelled "emerging". But it, too, is relatively well established in the clinic, where the high installation costs can be justified.

Psychologists have long used it to recreate scary scenarios while treating phobias. More recently it has shown promise for phantom limb pain and schizophrenia diagnosis. Many US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are being treated using virtual experiences.

Gartner forecasts 10 more years before virtual reality reaches the mainstream – a prediction some readers may remember from the 1980s – but it is likely to become mainstream for psychology much earlier than that.

Mind control

Haptics is another technology with consumer potential that's already being used in clinical contexts: for remote surgery and training, and for interpreting complex scan output.

And the computer interface technology that's likely to be the most significant of all can also be experienced properly only in a hospital so far. It's not hard to imagine who looks forward most eagerly to the latest developments in mind control of computers.

A handful of people already know what exerting such control can offer. Without lifting a finger they are able to send email, play video games(see video), control wheelchairs or prosthetic arms, update Twitter and even have their thoughts read aloud(see video)

Similarly, victims of accidents or injury provide the first hints of the kind of "upgrades" the otherwise healthy may in future choose to make to their bodies.

Seal of approval

Hospitals may not only be providing a preview of future interfaces, though – they may also be ensuring that they hit the big time with fewer design glitches.

Despite some conspicuous success in the smartphone arena, touch interface technology could still do with some improvement, and it's often less use than older but better-understood interfaces.

The technological nursery of the healthcare market could prevent so many ergonomic and design wrinkles making it to mass deployment in future.

Not only will the mainstream gadget industry have some tried-and-tested examples to draw on, but designs will have benefited from the safety and usability requirements demanded of medical devices by regulators like the US Food and Drug Administration.

Original article posted in New Scientist on 31 August 2009 by Tom Simonite

Artificial Blood Research: Giving Artificial Cells Movement Ability

Scientists in Japan are reporting an advance toward giving
artificial cells another hallmark of life: the ability to
tap an energy source and use it to undergo sustained
movement. They developed self-propelled oil droplets
equipped with chemical "engines" (highly reactive catalysts) that provide
self-propelled motion in the presence of a....

In artificial blood research the artificial cells are currently being worked upon by NASA to help with the depleted blood supplies in hospitals.

Other artificial blood research

1) US researchers are developing artificial cells capable of
synthesizing genes and making them into proteins.
Click here for original article

2) International Society or Artificial Cells,Blood
Substitutes and Biotechnology(ISABB) does research on
artificial cells for clinical applications in blood
substitutes, nanomedicine, regenerative medicine, tissue
engineering and cell/stem cell therapy.