The 1970s gave us the six-million-dollar man. Thirty years and quite a bit of inflation later we have the six-billion-dollar human: not a physical cyborg as such, instead an umbrella term for the latest developments in the growing field of technology for human enhancement.
Helping the blind to see again, being able to carry enormous loads without the prospect of backache and a prosthetic robotic hand that works (almost) like a real one were some of the ideas presented at a recent meeting of engineers, physicists, biologists and computer scientists organised by the American Association of Anatomists.
Seeing through walls or zooming in on faraway objects were among the special talents of six-million-dollar man, Steve Austin. For his modern equivalent, scientists are working on ways to restore functional sight to those who have become blind through disease.
Degenerative retinal diseases result in the death of the rods and cones, the cells responsible for light detection, at the back of the eye. Worldwide, more than 1,5-million people suffer from a form of inherited blindness called retinitis pigmentosa and, in an ageing population, loss of vision is increasingly common.
Daniel Palanker, a physicist at Stanford University in California, had the idea to bypass the dead rods and cones and to stimulate the cells of the inner retina with electrical signals directly. Previous research had shown this method allowed perception of light, and Palanker built a way to exploit it.
His bionic eye system is made up of a 3mm chip implanted into the retina and a pair of virtual-reality-style goggles containing a video camera. The goggles convert the video pictures into an infrared image. ”The image is projected on to the retina and the retinal implant has photosensitive pixels that convert infrared light into pulses of electrical current, stimulating the cells in the retina,” said Palanker.
So far, he has only fitted rats and rabbits with the bionic eye. Human trials will begin in a couple of years and, when they do, Palanker reckons the system will give people 20/80 vision — normal is 20/20, you need 20/40 for a driving licence and 20/400 is the legal definition of blindness — allowing people to read large fonts and recognise faces.
No cyborg could be complete without superhuman strength and Homayoon Kazerooni of the University of California, Berkeley, can help. ”The technology we developed is a robotic device a person would wear and this way, the device would carry a major load and the person would not feel any load,” he said.
The Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton (Bleex) fits along the legs and has a frame at the wearer’s back to fit a backpack. ”The maximum load is 90kg and the person will not feel anything at all. We thought the combination of human interaction, human decision-making process with machine power is a better solution for a lot of robotic tasks.”
Bleex has more than 40 sensors and a hydraulics system that, according to the inventors, work something like the human nervous system. The sensors feed information to a central computer brain, which continually calculates how to distribute the weight so that the wearer feels little or none of it.
The military uses of Bleex are obvious — soldiers who can carry huge loads without getting tired would be more useful on any battlefield. There are plenty of civilian applications too: firemen who need to climb stairs with heavy equipment or rescue workers who need to take supplies into areas where vehicles cannot go.
Prosthetics are another hot area of research. Modern artificial hands, for example, give wearers a better quality of life but they have little of the functionality of the real hands they replace. ”The current technology means that people can open and close an appendage, a hook, that has a cosmetic cover but nothing more. Everybody in the field knows we have to improve upon this,” said William Craelius of Rutgers University in New Jersey.
His artificial hand system, Dextra, is leagues ahead. By recording the movement of muscles in the remaining part of the arm as a person thinks about moving their hand, Dextra can control up to three fingers. Different patterns of muscle movement correspond to different movements and, after a few minutes of calibration, the robotic hand is ready for action. ”It enables the ability to type slowly or to play a piano piece. One person wanted to play the saxophone and, with three fingers, you can actually get quite musical with it,” said Craelius.
The next step is to enable Dextra to carry out more complex, coordinated movements. ”We’ve shown that it’s easy to get three-finger control and now we’re going through and trying to have people do many types of hand motion — grasping a key, opening a door, holding a hammer — to see how reliable the system is in being able to distinguish among all those,” he said. He intends to publish these results in a scientific journal later this year. – Guardian Unlimited Â