[Diego Marino] and his colleagues at the Politecnico di Torino (Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy) designed a prototype that allows for patients with motor deficits, such as spinal cord injury (SCI), to do rehabilitation via Functional Electrical Stimulation. They devised a system that records and interprets muscle signals from the physiotherapist and then stimulates specific muscles, in the patient, via an electro-stimulator.

The acquisition system is based on a BITalino board that records the Surface Electromyography (sEMG) signal from the muscles of the physiotherapist, while they perform a specific exercise designed for the patient’s rehabilitation plan. The BITalino uses Bluetooth to send the data to a PC where the data is properly crunched in Matlab in order to recognize and to isolate the muscular activity patterns.

After that, the signals are ‘replayed’ on the patient using a relay-board connected to a Globus Genesy 600 electro-stimulator. This relay board hack is mostly because the Globus Genesy is not programmable so this was a fast way for them to implement the stimulator. In their video we can see the muscle activation being replayed immediately after the ‘physiotherapist’ performs the movement. It’s clearly a prototype but it does show promising results.

It reminds us of the Myoelectric Hand, with humans instead. We featured an EMG tutorial a while back for those curious about this topic. Without taking the merit out of excellent and needed medical research, we all wait for the day that all our bio-signals can be easy read and translated to, let’s say, a huge avatar robot like METHOD-2. Right? Right?…

This concept to make a humanoid head, that speaks like a human, chooses phrases randomly. As (it) speaks , it moves head, eyeballs and eyebrows randomly in an emulation of a human. This can be useful for lonely people who cannot have a pet at home.

This is the basic idea..Later it is possible to develope it further to talk longer durations, and even tell short stories stored on an SD card.

read more

This concept to make a humanoid head, that speaks like a human, chooses phrases randomly. As (it) speaks , it moves head, eyeballs and eyebrows randomly in an emulation of a human. This can be useful for lonely people who cannot have a pet at home.

This is the basic idea..Later it is possible to develope it further to talk longer durations, and even tell short stories stored on an SD card.

read more

When we envision our transhumanist future, it's a little more profound than simply adding a sixth finger... but we suppose you've gotta start somewhere. Instructables user and employee Frenzy gave himself a rather primitive extra digit as part of a project for an Electronics and Robotics class at San Francisco State University. Sadly he doesn't provide step-by-step instructions for building your own cyborg appendage, but it doesn't seem too difficult. Frenzy borrowed heavily from other projects, using EMG sensors to trigger a servo controlled by an Arduino, which he strapped to the back of a glove. Like we said, doesn't seem particularly hard, once you figure out how to get the microcontroller to play nice with the sensors. Obviously this is just one small step step for DIY cyborgs. Next, we need to graph on a few extra arms to make one-man liveblogging a much simpler endeavor. To see Primitive Transhumanism #2: Sixth Finger in action, head on past the break.

Continue reading DIY cyborg appendage is less exciting than it sounds (video)

DIY cyborg appendage is less exciting than it sounds (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jun 2012 02:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.