Scientific Dictatorship

‘Bionic eye’ implant offers hope to the blind

Raw Story

...The device, known as the Argus II, is made by a California company called Second Sight. It was recently approved for use in Europe, and in the United States it has given a handful of test patients like Konstantopoulos cause for optimism.

"Without the system, I can't see anything. With the system, it's some kind of hope. Something is there," he said.

"Later on, who knows with technology what it can do? Everything comes little by little."

The device is similar to the cochlear implants that have allowed hundreds of thousands of deaf people to hear again, and is part of a growing field known as neuromodulation, or the science that helps people regain lost abilities such as sight, hearing and movement by stimulating the brain, spinal cord or nerves.

Ear implants work by picking up sound through a tiny microphone, then converting those signals into electrical impulses and sending them to an electrode array implanted in the patient. The electrodes gather the impulses and ship them to the auditory nerve, which hears them as sounds.

The retinal prosthesis follows a similar process. A tiny video camera on the glasses captures images and converts them into electrical signals that are fed to an electrode array that is surgically implanted in the patient's eye.

The visual signals are sent to the optic nerve and then to the brain, and the patient sees them as flashes of light and blurry shapes...[Full article]

Labels: bionics, vision

Budding artist Tilly, 5, gets to grips with her new bionic hand after losing limbs to meningitis

Daily Mail

A five-year-old girl who lost both her hands to meningitis is enjoying painting pictures again - after she was fitted with a state-of-the art prosthetic.

Tilly Lockey had both her hands amputated in 2007 and needs new limbs fitted every year as she grows.

She has now been fitted with a £24,000 right limb from a world-leading British bionics company that allows her to control all of her fingers using a sensor that picks up arm-muscle movements...[Full Article]

Labels: bionics, medical technology, prosthetic

New Bionic Arms Are Strong, Sensitive, Human Friendly

Robotics and prosthetics designers have been making great advances in the power, sensitivity and humanity of their creations.

Labels: bionics, robotics

Your Bionic Brain: The Merging Of Brian And Machine

The six-million dollar man was pure fantasy in the 70s -- but largely realistic technology today. And the future of this tech is even wilder: Implantable brain electrodes may be just around the corner.

Futurists and science-fiction writers have long speculated about merging human and machine, especially human brains and computers

. These dreams are slowly becoming reality: The deaf are hearing with bionic "ears," the blind see with the aid of electrodes, an amputee is moving a prosthetic arm by thought, a man paralyzed with locked-in syndrome is "speaking" through a brain electrode connected to a computerized synthesizer.

One such bionic advance -- thought-driven neural implants -- could change the lives of millions of people, including the many thousands conscious but now entombed within their own bodies in what's called locked-in syndrome, and the thousands of wounded warriors returning from battle with missing limbs and devastating brain injuries. And it could open tremendous opportunities for people in the future who would like to take their minds where no man's body has gone before -- into deepest space or the deepest of ocean depths, for example, through the "senses" of a thought-driven robot...

Labels: bionics, brain, nerual implants