[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?…

Short of scoring a spot on the ISS experiment docket, putting your scientific aspirations into orbit can be a bit tricky. Why not try crowdsourcing your way into space? ArduSat's barking up that very tree, asking Kickstarter contributors to help them get a Arduino CubeSat off the ground. Headed by NanoSatisfi, a tech startup operating out of NASA's Ames Research Center, the project hopes to raise enough funds to launch an Arduino bank and a bevy of open-source sensors into orbit. The payoff for backers? Access. Varying levels of contribution are rewarded with personalized space broadcasts, remote access to the space hardware's onboard cameras and even use of the machine's sensors to run experiments of the backer's own design. If all goes well, the team hopes to launch more satellites for the everyman, including a unit dedicated to letting would-be stellar photographers take celestial snapshots. Sure, it's far cry from actually launching yourself into the stars, but would you rather be a tourist, or a scientist? Check out project at the source link below, and mull over that for awhile.

ArduSat wants to put Arduino satellite, your experiments into orbit originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jun 2012 04:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.