$42,000 Prosthetic Hand Outperformed By $50 3D Printed Hand

Watch this robotic wheelchair turn its wheels into legs and climb over stairs

by George Dvorsky

Traditionally, wheels and stairs are a tragic combination, what's akin to mixing oil and water. Looking to overturn this convention, researchers at the Chiba Institute of Technology have developed a robotic wheelchair that can actually climb over steps.

In addition to this, the wheelchairbot can line its wheels up, and extend stabilizers to the left and right, enabling it to turn a circle. This makes it easy to reverse, even in a narrow space.

We were particular about using wheels, because this kind of vehicle will mostly move on ordinary paved surfaces. The most efficient way of getting around on paved surfaces is to use wheels, like a car. So, this robot mainly uses wheels, but the wheels can become legs.

For now, we're presenting this system and form as a concept, and the motion has mostly been worked out. So, we're at the stage where we can show this robot to the world. In the next phase, we'll get a variety of people to try it, so we can fine-tune the user experience.

http://io9.com/5952224/watch-this-robotic-wheelchair-turn-its-wheels-into-legs-and-climb-over-stairs

Watch this paralyzed woman control a robotic arm using only her mind

Watch this video, and witness a breakthrough in the field of brain-machine interfaces. Researchers have been improving upon BrainGate — a brain-machine interface that allows users to control an external device with their minds — for years, but what you see here is the most advanced incarnation of the implant system to date. It is nothing short of remarkable.

Starting at around 3:10, you can watch Cathy Hutchinson — who has been paralyzed from the neck down for 15 years — drink her morning coffee by controlling a robotic arm using only her mind. According to research published in today's issue of Nature, Hutchinson is one of two quadriplegic patients — both of them stroke victims — who have learned to control the device by means of the BrainGate neural implant. The New York Times reports that it's the first published demonstration that humans with severe brain injuries can control a sophisticated prosthetic arm with such a system.

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Paralyzed Man Regains Hand Function after Breakthrough Nerve Rewiring Procedure

A 71-year-old man who became paralyzed from the waist down and lost all use of both hands in a 2008 car accident has regained motor function in his fingers after doctors rewired his nerves to bypass the damaged ones in a pioneering surgical procedure, according to a case study published on Tuesday.

While the man still had limited arm, elbow and shoulder movement, because he had crushed his spinal cord at the C7 vertebrae located at the base of his neck, the nerve circuits responsible for sending singles from the brain to the muscles in his hands became severed, which resulted in loss of movement in both his hands.

However, because the nearby nerves had not been injured in the accident, surgeons were able to cut an undamaged nerve in the man’s elbow and connect it to the damaged nerve which activates muscles in the hand responsible for grasping objects.

"The circuit [in the hand] is intact, but no longer connected to the brain,” Surgeon Ida Fox, an assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Washington University, explained to the BBC. "What we do is take that circuit and restore the connection to the brain."

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Graduate Student's iPhone App Gives Voice to Disabled Users

Samuel Sennott, a doctoral student in special educaton at Pennsylvania State University's main campus, created an iPhone application that helps people with communication disabilities speak. He worked with David Niemeijer, an Amsterdam-based developer, to build the software, called Proloquo2Go.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Graduate-Students-iPhone-App/20549/

Robot Bear to Help Nurse Sick Patients

By Claire Bates

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1209605/Robot-bear-help-nurse-sick-patients.html

A nursing robot built in the shape of a friendly bear is being trialled for use in Japanese hospitals. Named RIBA, short for Robot for Interactive Body Assistance, the bot was designed to aid medical staff by lifting patients in and out of beds.

Is this the year we finally wipe out polio once and for all?

In 1979, the World Health Organization successfully eradicated smallpox, removing one of history's greatest killers from the face of the Earth. Now, 33 years later, we just might be on the verge of repeating that feat with polio.

Polio, which once killed or paralyzed a half million people each year in the 1940s and 1950s, has been on the run from scientists and health officials for some time now. While there were 52,552 recorded cases of polio worldwide as recently as 1980 - and that vastly underestimates the true total that year, which is estimated to have been as high as 400,000 - there were just 649 new cases of the disease last year. The Americas, Europe, the countries of the Indian Ocean, and much of the Pacific Rim has been polio-free for over a decade.

Polio is now on track to be the second human virus (and third overall, including the bovine disease rinderpest) to be certified eradicated, and the big breakthrough this past year has been in India, which has not seen a case of polio since January 2011. That means the country just completed its first polio-free year, leaving just three countries where the disease is still endemic: Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. With 99% of incidences of the disease long since destroyed, that just leaves the 1%. Unfortunately, that 1% has proven almost intractable, with the efforts to get rid of it compared to "trying to squeeze Jell-O to death."

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The first scientific evidence that massage helps heal muscles after exercise

The Wall Street Journal's Katherine Hobson has a story today about a small study that tested the common-sense idea that massage helps soothe sore muscles. She writes:

The researchers exercised 11 young men to exhaustion over about 70 minutes, then massaged a single leg (determined randomly for each man) for ten minutes. The subjects received a muscle biopsy in both quad muscles to gather samples for massaged and non-massaged legs. The biopsy was repeated after a 2.5-hour rest period.

Researchers analyzed the samples from the different legs to see what was going on after the massage. They found two major changes: reduced signs of inflammation, and an increase in production of mitochondria, the cell's energy factories.

Curbed production of inflammatory molecules "may reduce pain by the same mechanism as conventional anti-inflammatory drugs" like aspirin and ibuprofen, the authors write.

The increase in mitochondria might also aid in recovery, the researchers speculate. This means that massage joins a few other alternative therapies in the category of "it works, but we're not sure why." Still, it's useful to know that massage causes a measurable physiological reaction.

http://io9.com/5881470/the-first-scientific-evidence-that-massage-helps-heal-muscles-after-exercise