Virtual humans, both physical (robots) and online avatars will be added to the workforce. By 2020, robots will be physically superior to humans. IBM’s Blue Brain project, for instance, is a 10-year mission to create a human brain using hardware and software. 
We have passed the threshold where more things than people are connected to the Net. The transition to IPv6 supports limitless connectivity. By 2020, there will be more than six Net-linked devices for every person on Earth. Currently, most of us are connected to Net full-time through three or more devices like PC, phones, TV etc. Next up are sensor networks, using low-power sensors that “collect, transmit, analyze and distribute data on a massive scale,” says Evans.
By 2015, one zettabyte of data will flow over the Internet. One zettabyte equals stack of books from Earth to Pluto 20 times. “This is the same as every person on Earth tweeting for 100 years, or 125 million years of your favourite one-hour TV show,” says Evans. Our love of high-definition video accounts for much of the increase. By Cisco’s count, 91% of Internet data in 2015 will be video.
Technology is finally adapting to us. Evans cites image recognition, puzzle resolution, augmented reality and gesture-based computing as key examples of such technologies.
By 2020, one-third of all data will live in or pass through the cloud. IT spending on innovation and cloud computing could top $1 trillion by 2014. 
How are all networked devices going to be powered, and who or what is going to power them? The answer, says Evans, lies in small things. Solar arrays will become increasingly important. 
The ability of people to connect with each other all around the world, within seconds, via social media isn’t just a social phenomenon, Evans says it’s a flattening out of who has access to technology. He cited the example of Wael Ghonim, the Middle East-based Google engineer whose Facebook page, “We are all Khaled Saeed,” was a spark in the Egyptian uprising and one of the key events of the Arab Spring.
March 2010: Retina implant restores vision to blind patients.
In our research lab testing our system on healthy people, everything appeared to function perfectly. The real test was when we visited a man who, because he was locked-in, had not been able to communicate with his family in years. The Archinoetics team looked on anxiously as the sensors were placed on his head and the computer started receiving data. As with many studies involving human subjects, our first tests did not work. But, over the course of several days, we worked through a number of challenges and were able to help this man answer several yes or no questions that his family wanted to ask him.
Archinoetics has developed a BCI called “brain painting”. This application allows someone to paint through consciously modifying the level of activity in a region of his or her brain. Typically this means either “singing in your head” or repeating nonsense syllables in your head (such as “la la la”). The first activity activates the language area, thereby raising the signal measured by OTIS, whereas the second activity lowers the signal. In addition to being a fun creative tool, brain painting also helps people learn the skills necessary to use a BCI effectively for communication.
This could be a boon to the several million people in the United States who are blind or visually impaired as a result of retinal degeneration. Every year, 50,000 people in the United States become blind, according to the National Federation of the Blind. But only a couple of dozen Americans have retinal implants.
The team, consisting of ophthalmology Associate Professor Daniel Palanker, electrical engineering Assistant Professor Peter Peumans and neurobiology Assistant Professor Stephen Baccus of Stanford, and biophysics Assistant Professor Alexander Sher of the University of California-Santa Cruz, presented their research Dec. 9 at the International Electron Devices Meeting in Baltimore.
Retinal implants are arrays of electrodes, placed at the back of the eye, which partially restore vision to people with diseases that cause their light-sensing photoreceptors to die. Typically, a camera embedded in glasses collects visual information and sends it to a computer that converts the images to electrical signals, which are then transmitted to the implant and interpreted by the brain. There are several private companies and universities working on different versions, but most people with implants can only make out fuzzy borders between light and dark areas.
Analogous to high-definition TV
The Stanford implant would allow patients to make out the shape of objects and see meaningful images. "A good analogy is high-def TV," Baccus said. "If you only have a few pixels of stimulation, you're not going to see much. One clear advantage of our implant is high resolution." The Stanford implant has approximately 1,000 electrodes, compared to 60 electrodes commonly found in fully implantable systems.
What's more, patients would not have to move their heads to see, as they do with older implants. Although we don't notice it, images fade when we do not move our eyes, and we make several tiny eye movements each second to prevent fading. With older retinal implants, the camera moves when the head moves, but not when the eyes move.The Stanford implant, on the other hand, retains the natural link between eye movements and vision, Palanker said. A patient would wear a video camera that transmits images to a processor, which displays the images on an LCD screen on the inside of patient's goggles. The LCD display transmits infrared light pulses that project the image to photovoltaic cells implanted underneath the retina. The photovoltaic cells convert light signals into electrical impulses that in turn stimulate retinal neurons above them.
As patients move their eyes, the light falls on a different part of the implant, just as visible light falls on different parts of the retina. "The Palanker group has developed a device that actually allows patients to see infrared light on the implant and visible light through the normal optics of the eye," Baccus said.
"It's a sophisticated approach," said Shelley Fried, a research scientist working on the Boston Retinal Implant Project. "It should definitely be helpful."
This is also the first flexible implant, and it makes use of a material commonly used in computer chips and solar cells. Peumans and his team at the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility engineered a silicon implant with tiny bridges that allow it to fold over the shape of the eye. "The advantage of having it flexible is that relatively large implants can be placed under the retina without being deformed, and the whole image would stay in focus," Palanker said. A set of flexible implants can cover an even larger portion of the retina, allowing patients to see the entire visual field presented on the display.
"It's really a very interesting idea," Fried said. "The ability to get all the electrodes to sit perfectly on the retina would be a very nice advantage." He said that a spring technology allows their device to conform to the contour of the eye, maintaining close contact between electrodes and neurons.
The tiny crevices between the bridges serve a useful function. Distant retinal cells migrate to the implant and fill in the spaces between the electrodes. Previously, one major challenge was to get cells close enough to the device to receive signals, Fried said. "If we can find a way to bring the retinal neurons closer to the electrode, that would have a huge advantage," he said.
Implanted under the retina
The Stanford device is implanted under the retina, at the earliest possible stage in the visual pathway. "In many degenerative diseases where the photoreceptors are lost, you lose the first and second cells in the pathway," Baccus said. "Ideally you want to talk to the next cell that's still there." The goal is to preserve the complex circuitry of the retina so that images appear more natural.
"With most of the current devices, we are replicating only very few elements of normal retinal signaling," Fried said.
To further enhance the naturalness of restored vision, Baccus and Palanker are developing software that performs functions that the retina normally performs. For example, cells in the retina tend to enhance the appearance of edges, or boundaries between objects. What's more, objects that we focus on are seen in better detail than objects that appear at the corners of our eyes.
The researchers hope to incorporate these features in the next generation of retinal implants. Baccus envisions a day when patients will be able to adjust their implants to see objects better, just like an optometrist adjusts the lens while we read a letter chart.
Palanker and his team will test the ability of animals with retinal diseases similar to those in humans to use the implant to discriminate visual patterns.
One of the major challenges is to understand how the retina works, especially after it is damaged. "We operate on the assumption that the photoreceptors are gone, but otherwise it's a normal retina," Baccus said. "This is almost certainly not true."
Future devices should learn, patient by patient, the new language needed to communicate with the altered circuitry of the damaged retina, he said. Even if the retinal circuitry were unaltered, the brain would still have to learn how to interpret the signals. By mimicking normal vision, retinal implants may overcome these obstacles and bring enhanced vision to blind patients.
Provided by Stanford University
Nissan has developed a mini robotic car that can move autonomously in groups while avoiding crashing into obstacles (including other cars).
The Eporo, Nissan says, is the first robot car designed to move in a group by sharing its position and other information. The aim is to incorporate the technology into passenger cars to reduce accidents and traffic jams.
Although a group of Eporos may look like a gang of cybernetic Jawa, Nissan says the cars' design was inspired by the way fish move in schools.
An evolution of the bumblebee-inspired BR23C robot car unveiled last year, the Eporo uses Nissan's collision avoidance technology to travel in groups. Check out BR23C trying to get away from a Japanese lady in this video.
Eporo can dodge obstacles just like fish.
The automaker studied how large schools of fish can move without colliding. It says Eporo imitates three rules of fish movement: avoiding crashes, traveling side by side, and keeping close to other members of the school.
The robots use laser range finders and ultra-wideband radio to determine distance to obstacles. They also communicate with each other to form the most efficient group formation to maneuver through tight spots.
Eporo stands for "Episode O (Zero) Robot." That zinger of a mouthful means zero episodes, as in zero accidents and zero emissions.
Nissan intends to show off Eporo at the Ceatec trade show next week in Tokyo.
Original article by Tim Hornyak for Crave
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.
The Berkeley team implanted electrodes into the brain and muscles of two species: green June beetles called Cotinus texana from the southern US, and the much larger African species Mecynorrhina torquata. Both responded to stimulation in much the same way, but the weight of the electronics and their battery meant that only Mecynorrhina – which can grow to the size of a human palm – was strong enough to fly freely under radio control.
A particular series of electrical pulses to the brain causes the beetle to take off. No further stimulation is needed to maintain the flight. Though the average length of flights during trials was just 45 seconds, one lasted for more than 30 minutes. A single pulse causes a beetle to land again.
The insects' flight can also be directed. Pulses sent to the brain trigger a descent, on average by 60 centimetres. The beetles can be steered by stimulating the wing muscle on the opposite side from the direction they are required to turn, though this works only three-quarters of the time. After each manoeuvre, the beetles quickly right themselves and continue flying parallel to the ground.
Tyson Hedrick, a biomechanist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the research, says he is surprised at the level of control achieved, because the controlling impulses were delivered to comparatively large regions of the insect brain.
Precisely stimulating individual neurons or circuits may harness the beetles more precisely, he told New Scientist, but don't expect aerial acrobatics. "It's not entirely clear how much control a beetle has over its own flight," Hedrick says. "If you've ever seen a beetle flying in the wild, they're not the most graceful insects."
The research may be more successful in revealing just how the brain, nerves and muscles of insects coordinate flight and other behaviours than at bringing six-legged cyborg spies into service, Hedrick adds. "It may end up helping biologists more than it will help DARPA."
It's a view echoed by Reid Harrison, an electrical engineer at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, who has designed brain-recording backpacks for insects. "I'm sceptical about their ability to do surveillance for the following reason: no one has solved the power issue."
Batteries, solar cells and piezoelectrics that harvest energy from movement cannot provide enough power to run electrodes and radio transmitters for very long, Harrison says. "Maybe we'll have some advances in those technologies in the near future, but based on what you can get off the shelf now it's not even close."
Journal reference: Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, DOI: 10.3389/neuro.07.024.2009
Ginkgo BioWorks aims to push synthetic biology to the factory level.
In a warehouse building in Boston, wedged between a cruise-ship drydock and Au Bon Pain's corporate headquarters, sits Ginkgo BioWorks, a new synthetic-biology startup that aims to make biological engineering easier than baking bread. Founded by five MIT scientists, the company offers to assemble biological parts--such as strings of specific genes--for industry and academic scientists.
 |
| Biological parts: Ginkgo BioWorks, a synthetic-biology startup, is automating the process of building biological machines. Shown here is a liquid-handling robot that can prepare hundreds of reactions. Credit: Ginkgo BioWorks |
"Think of it as rapid prototyping in biology--we make the part, test it, and then expand on it," says Reshma Shetty, one of the company's cofounders. "You can spend more time thinking about the design, rather than doing the grunt work of making DNA." A very simple project, such as assembling two pieces of DNA, might cost $100, with prices increasing from there.
Synthetic biology is the quest to systematically design and build novel organisms that perform useful functions, such as producing chemicals, using genetic-engineering tools. The field is often considered the next step beyond metabolic engineering because it aims to completely overhaul existing systems to create new functionality rather than improve an existing process with a number of genetic tweaks.
Scientists have so far created microbes that can produce drugs and biofuels, and interest among industrial chemical makers is growing. While companies already exist to synthesize pieces of DNA, Ginkgo assembles synthesized pieces of DNA to create functional genetic pathways. (Assembling specific genes into long pieces of DNA is much cheaper than synthesizing that long piece from scratch.)
Ginkgo will build on technology developed by Tom Knight, a research scientist at MIT and one of the company's cofounders, who started out his scientific career as an engineer. "I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things," says Knight.
Scientists generally create biological parts by stitching together genes with specific functions, using specialized enzymes to cut and sew the DNA. The finished part is then inserted into bacteria, where it can perform its designated task. Currently, this process is mostly done by a lab technician or graduate student; consequently, the process is slow, and the resulting construct isn't optimized for use in other projects. Knight developed a standardized way of putting together pieces of DNA, called the BioBricks standard, in which each piece of DNA is tagged on both sides with DNA connectors that allow pieces to be easily interchanged."If your part obeys those rules, we can use identical reactions every time to assemble those fragments into larger constructs," says Knight. "That allows us to standardize and automate the process of assembly. If we want to put 100 different versions of a system together, we can do that straightforwardly, whereas it would be a tedious job to do with manual techniques." The most complicated part that Ginkgo has built to date is a piece of DNA with 15 genes and a total of 30,000 DNA letters. The part was made for a private partner, and its function has not been divulged.
Assembling parts is only part of the challenge in building biological machines. Different genes can have unanticipated effects on each other, interfering with the ultimate function. "One of the things we'll be able to do is to assemble hundreds or thousands of versions of a specific pathway with slight variations," says Knight. Scientists can then determine which version works best.
So far, Knight says, the greatest interest has come from manufacturing companies making chemicals for cosmetics, perfumes, and flavorings. "Many of them are trying to replace a dirty chemical process with an environmentally friendly, biologically based process," he says.
Ginkgo is one of just a handful of synthetic-biology companies. Codon Devices, a well-funded startup that synthesized DNA, ceased operations earlier this year. "The challenge now is not to synthesize genes; there are a few companies that do that," says Shetty. "It's to build pathways that can make specific chemicals, such as fuels." And unlike Codon, Ginkgo is starting small. The company is funded by seed money and a $150,000 loan from Lifetech Boston, a program to attract biotech to Boston. Its lab space is populated with banks of PCR machines, which amplify DNA, and liquid-handling robots, mostly bought on eBay or from other biotech firms that have gone out of business. And the company already has a commercial product--a kit sold through New England Biolabs that allows scientists to put together parts on their own.
"If successful, they will be providing a very important service for synthetic biology," says Chris Voigt, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, San Francisco. "There isn't anybody else who would be characterizing and providing parts to the community. I think that this type of research needs to occur outside of the academic community--at either a company or a nonprofit institute."
Original article by Emily Singer for MIT Technology Review
Right:Smoke signals helps robots fly better (Image: Simon Walker, Animal Flight Group, Oxford University)
A LOCUST flight simulator could be the key to perfecting the ultimate surveillance machine: an artificial flying insect. The simulator can model the way wings of varying shapes and surface features beat, as well as how they change their shape during flight.
The device was created using extremely high-speed flash photography to track the way smoke particles flow over a locust's wings in a wind tunnel - a technique called particle flow velocimetry. This allowed researchers at the University of Oxford to build a computer model of the insect's wing motion. They then built software that mimicked not only this motion, but also how wing surface features, such as structural veins and corrugations, and the wings' deformation as they flap, change aerodynamic performance.
The work has shown that wings' surface structures are crucial to efficient lift generation, says lead researcher Adrian Thomas (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1175928).
The simulator could be a big step forward for the many teams around the world who are designing robotic insects, mainly for military purposes, though Thomas expects them to have a massive role as toys, too. "Imagine sitting in your living room doing aerial combat with radio-controlled dragonflies. Everybody would love that," he says.
Imagine sitting in your living room doing aerial combat with remote-controlled dragonflies
Until now, modelling insect wings involved building physical replicas from rigid materials and estimating how they might move from observations of insect flight. Thomas hopes the simulator will take the guesswork out of the process, especially as every flying insect has uniquely shaped wings and wing beat patterns.
Building miniature aircraft is of great interest to the armed forces. In the UK, for example, the Ministry of Defence wants to create a device that can fly in front of a convoy and detect explosives on the road ahead. In the US, the Pentagon's research arm DARPA is funding development of a "nano air vehicle" (NAV) for surveillance that it states must weigh no more than 10 grams and have only a 7.5-centimetre wingspan.
Last month, DARPA contractor AeroVironment of Monrovia, California, demonstrated the first two-winged robot capable of hovering flight (see video at http://bit.ly/18LR8U). It achieved a stable take-off and hovered for 20 seconds. Other DARPA-funded projects by Micropropulsion and Daedalus Flight Systems are also thought to have achieved hovering robotic flight this year.
"Getting stable hover at the 10-gram size scale with beating wings is an engineering breakthrough, requiring much new understanding and invention," says Ronald Fearing, a micromechanics and flight researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. "The next step will be to get the flight efficiency up so hover can work for several minutes."
But how can such machines be made more efficient? Better batteries and lighter materials will help, but most important will be improving wing structure so the aircraft more accurately imitate - or even improve upon - the way insects fly.
So how do insects fly? For a long time no one really knew. In 1919, German aeronautical engineer Wilhelm Hoff calculated that a pollen-laden bumblebee should not have enough lift to get airborne according to the rules of aerodynamics as understood at the time.
It wasn't until 1981 that Tony Maxworthy of the University of Southern California hit on a possible reason: his working model of a fly's wings, immersed in oil, showed large vortices were spinning off the leading edge of the wing as it beat (Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, vol 13, p 329). Within the vortices air is moving at high velocity, and is therefore at low pressure, hinting at a lift-creating mechanism unlike that of conventional aircraft, in which an angled wing travelling forward deflects air downwards, creating an opposing upward force.
In 1996 Thomas was a member of Charles Ellington's team at the University of Cambridge, which identified the mechanism by which bugs created high lift forces - using a model of a hawkmoth. "We found a leading-edge vortex that was stable over the whole of the downstroke," says Thomas.
The nature of the leading-edge vortex is dependent on the size of the wings, their number, the pattern described by the beating wing and the wing structure.
This work has laid the foundations for researchers such as Robert Wood and his team at Harvard University, who are investigating ways to make insect wings (Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/4/3/036002). They have developed a new way to build flexible wings from moulds using microchip manufacturing techniques. Using elastic polymers and elegant, vein-like supporting structures, the researchers can build wings with variable camber, and with different corrugations embossed in them, in an attempt to mimic the in-flight aerodynamics and deformation of real insect wings.
Thomas is also focusing on the way insect wings deform in flight. "If we use a wing model with all the complex curves, twists and corrugations of the real insect it is 50 per cent more efficient than a model with rigid flat-plate wings, for the same lift generation. That would be a huge saving in power for a micro air vehicle," he says.
Although the Oxford team's simulator is geared for locust wings at present, the researchers are adjusting the software to model the hoverfly - with other insect types to follow.
"What we've shown is that modern aerodynamics really can accurately model insect flight," Thomas says. "That old myth about aerodynamics not being able to model bumblebee flight really is dead now."
oRIGINAL ARTICLE WRITTEN BY pAUL mARKS FOR nEW sCIENTIST
Such a chip would not restore normal vision but it could help blind people more easily navigate a room or walk down a sidewalk.
"Anything that could help them see a little better and let them identify objects and move around a room would be an enormous help," says Shawn Kelly, a researcher in MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics and member of the Boston Retinal Implant Project.
The research team, which includes scientists, engineers and ophthalmologists from Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, the Boston VA Medical Center and Cornell as well as MIT, has been working on the retinal implant for 20 years. The research is funded by the VA Center for Innovative Visual Rehabilitation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Catalyst Foundation and the MOSIS microchip fabrication service.
Led by John Wyatt, MIT professor of electrical engineering, the team recently reported a new prototype that they hope to start testing in blind patients within the next three years.
Electrical stimulation
Patients who received the implant would wear a pair of glasses with a camera that sends images to a microchip attached to the eyeball. The glasses also contain a coil that wirelessly transmits power to receiving coils surrounding the eyeball.
When the microchip receives visual information, it activates electrodes that stimulate nerve cells in the areas of the retina corresponding to the features of the visual scene. The electrodes directly activate optical nerves that carry signals to the brain, bypassing the damaged layers of retina.
One question that remains is what kind of vision this direct electrical stimulation actually produces. About 10 years ago, the research team started to answer that by attaching electrodes to the retinas of six blind patients for several hours.
When the electrodes were activated, patients reported seeing a small number of "clouds" or "drops of blood" in their field of vision, and the number of clouds or blood drops they reported corresponded to the number of electrodes that were stimulated. When there was no stimulus, patients accurately reported seeing nothing. Those tests confirmed that retinal stimulation can produce some kind of organized vision in blind patients, though further testing is needed to determine how useful that vision can be.
After those initial tests, with grants from the Boston Veteran's Administration Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health, the researchers started to build an implantable chip, which would allow them to do more long-term tests. Their goal is to produce a chip that can be implanted for at least 10 years.
One of the biggest challenges the researchers face is designing a surgical procedure and implant that won't damage the eye. In their initial prototypes, the electrodes were attached directly atop the retina from inside the eye, which carries more risk of damaging the delicate retina. In the latest version, described in the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, the implant is attached to the outside of the eye, and the electrodes are implanted behind the retina.
That subretinal location, which reduces the risk of tearing the retina and requires a less invasive surgical procedure, is one of the key differences between the MIT implant and retinal prostheses being developed by other research groups.
Another feature of the new MIT prototype is that the chip is now contained in a hermetically sealed titanium case. Previous versions were encased in silicone, which would eventually allow water to seep in and damage the circuitry.
While they have not yet begun any long-term tests on humans, the researchers have tested the device in Yucatan miniature pigs, which have roughly the same size eyeballs as humans. Those tests are only meant to determine whether the implants remain functional and safe and are not designed to observe whether the pigs respond to stimuli to their optic nerves.
So far, the prototypes have been successfully implanted in pigs for up to 10 months, but further safety refinements need to be made before clinical trials in humans can begin.
Wyatt and Kelly say they hope that once human trials begin and blind patients can offer feedback on what they're seeing, they will learn much more about how to configure the algorithm implemented by the chip to produce useful vision.Patients have told them that what they would like most is the ability to recognize faces. "If they can recognize faces of people in a room, that brings them into the social environment as opposed to sitting there waiting for someone to talk to them," says Kelly.
Journal reference:
BRS Labs announced a video-surveillance technology called Behavioral Analytics, which leverages cognitive reasoning, and processes visual data on a level similar to the human brain.Eyeborg Phase II from eyeborg on Vimeo.
