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

OpenDyslexic font gains ground with help of Instapaper

By Leo Kelion, Technology reporter
 
 A free-to-use font designed to help people with dyslexia read online content is gaining favour.

OpenDyslexic's characters have been given "heavy-weighted bottoms" to prevent them from flipping and swapping around in the minds of their readers.

A recent update to the popular app Instapaper has adopted the text format as an option for its users.

The font has also been built into a word processor, an ebook reader and has been installed on school computers.

The project was created by Abelardo Gonzalez, a New Hampshire-based mobile app designer, who released his designs onto the web at the end of last year.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19734341

Smart Accessible Mobile Challenge 2012

The Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards 2012 are hosting a €200k prize fund competition. It is calling on developers across Europe to design smartphone applications and services which consider the needs older people and people with disabilities.

In support of the competition, Vodafone, Mobile Monday, in conjunction with NDRC Inventorium have partnered with the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology and the Irish Internet Association (IIA) to run a two-day workshop to stimulate the generation of smartphone app ideas to submit to the competition for a share of €200k worth of prize money.

The two-day workshop will explore the challenges, problems and commercial opportunities that exist for developers and entrepreneurs when building smartphone applications that consider the needs of this significant demographic.

http://smartaccessiblemobile-estw.eventbrite.com/

Surgical implant will allow cyborg artist to see colors through sound

by George Dvorsky

For years now, colorblind artist Neil Harbisson has used a special head-mounted device to help him translate colors into sound. Not content to wear it on the head for the rest of his life, however, Harbisson has decided to have it surgically implanted. The upcoming procedure is part of the European artist's larger effort to get people accustomed to the idea of cybernetic implants.

Harbisson was born with a rare condition called achromatopsia, which limits his color perception to black and white. Eight years ago he developed a device that helped him correlate sound frequencies to the wavelengths of colors. At first he used headphones, but he has increasingly incorporated the device into his body. Even his passport photo shows him wearing the device — what he calls the eyeborg.

MORE HERE >>>

Ukrainian students invent gloves that convert sign language into speech

by George Dvorsky

With all the marvelous text-to-speech and speech-to-text technologies currently in our midst, it's surprising to realize just how few of these devices actually serve as assistive devices — particularly for the hearing-impaired. But a new invention from a group of Ukrainian students is set to change all that: They have developed a glove that can translate the movements made by sign language into speech.

Called EnableTalk, the gloves are fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers — as well as solar cells to increase battery life (talk about attention to detail). It has a built in system that can translate sign language into text and then into spoken words using a text-to-speech engine. And the entire system can work over Bluetooth enabling smartphone connection. The project was a finalist at Microsoft's Imagine Cup held in Sydney Australia, created by the QuadSquad team.

MORE HERE >>>

Seeing through bionic eyes

Indoor Navigation System for Blind

ScienceDaily (May 18, 2012) — University of Nevada, Reno computer science engineering team Kostas Bekris and Eelke Folmer presented their indoor navigation system for people with visual impairments at two national conferences in the past two weeks. The researchers explained how a combination of human-computer interaction and motion-planning research was used to build a low-cost accessible navigation system, called Navatar, which can run on a standard smartphone.

MORE HERE >>>

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.

MORE HERE >>>

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."

MORE HERE >>>

Artificial retinas give blind patients ability to see light and shapes

By George Dvorsky

Two British men who were completely blind for years have regained some of their vision, after undergoing surgery to fit eye implants, according to the BBC.

This pioneering treatment is at an early stage of development, but it marks an important step forward in an effort to help those who have lost their sight from a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa.

The breakthrough was part of a clinical trial carried out at the Oxford Eye Hospital and King's College Hospital in London by Robert MacLaren and and Tim Jackson. Their work focuses on a previously untreatable condition known as retinitis pigmentosa (RP) - a type of inherited progressive retinal dystrophy in which abnormalities of the photoreceptors (rods and cones) or the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) of the retina lead to progressive visual loss. The condition happens when the photoreceptor cells at the back of the eye gradually cease to function. MORE HERE >>>

iOS for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC),

A new study, conducted by David Niemeijer, Ph.D., CEO of AssistiveWare, and done in conjunction with Prof. Anne M. Donnellan, Ph.D. (University of San Diego) and Prof. Jodi A. Robledo, Ph.D. (California State University at San Marcos), explored Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), and the role of iPads, iPod touches and iPhones.

The survey polled 232 people: 17 AAC Users, 98 family members, caregivers and friends of AAC users, and 117 professionals working with AAC users.

The study’s findings include:

• 60% to 80% of the AAC users and families reported improvements in communication with others, in independence, in behavior, in the atmosphere at home, and in general wellbeing since starting with Proloquo2Go or another full-featured AAC App.
• About 50% of the adult AAC users and over 55% of the family members and caregivers report an improvement of verbalization and speech for the AAC user.
• 40-70% of respondents report use of an iOS AAC app to communicate in a variety of other settings beyond the home.

http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/04/19/autism-awareness-ipads-and-developers/

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."

MORE HERE >>

Breakthrough: The first sound recordings based on reading people’s minds

Neuroscientists have developed a way to listen to words you've heard, by translating brain activity directly into sound. Their findings represent a major step towards understanding how our brains make sense of speech, and are paving the way for brain implants that could one day translate your inner thoughts into audible sentences.

Every language on Earth is made up of distinct acoustic features. The volume or rate at which syllables are uttered, for example, allow our minds to make sense out of speech. How the brain identifies these features and translates them into relevant information, however, remains poorly understood.

MORE HERE >>

Amazing video shows us the actual movies that play inside our mind

By Alasdair Wilkins

This is about as awesome as neuroscience gets. This video shows us some everyday clips, and - thanks to some super-advanced brain imaging and computer simulations - how those clips are seen inside our brains.

Researchers at UC Berkeley used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and some seriously complex computational models to figure out what images our minds create when presented with movie and TV clips. So far, the process is only able to reconstruct the neural equivalents of things people have already seen, but eventually it might be possible to construct the images people see in dreams and memories.

This could also open up new ways to communicate with those whose speech is severely impaired, such as stroke victims, patients with neurological diseases, and even people in comas. It's probably worth stressing that we're decades away from using this tech to read people's thoughts and intentions, just in case that's something you're worried about.

MORE HERE >>

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

Foundations of AT Classlist, Wednesday, 6:30-9:30

Snezana Bechtina, DT202A
Andrew Costello, DT202A
Niall Duffy, DT202A
Gabriel Lawless, DT202A
Kerri Toft, DT202A

How does your brain create short-term memories?

The brain's long-term memory allows us to hold onto experiences long after we initially encountered them. But short-term memory is a more fleeting and mysterious phenomenon, allowing us to hang onto a thought only until we're distracted by something else.

While the basics of how the brain creates long-term memories is decently well understood - it's basically just a question of encoding data in the brain so that it can be recalled later - short-term memory is harder to understand. After all, the whole point of short-term memory is that nothing is being recorded, at least not for more than about twenty to thirty seconds. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics - which is one of the more awesome things a Max Planck Institute can be for - decided to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Previous research has shown that structures in the frontal region of the brain are involved in short-term memory, whereas visual information is processed in areas found in the back of the brain. That's tricky, because the subjects of short-term memories are often things you just saw - in other words, visual information. Those two distant parts of the brain need to be able to work together for our brains to hold onto visual information in the short-term.

To figure out how all this works, the researchers showed some images to monkeys while recording electrical activity in both of these key regions of their brains. After being initially shown one picture, the monkeys would be shown another after a short break, and they had to use their short-term memory to figure out whether they were looking at the same picture or a different one.

Here's where things get interesting - the electrical activity revealed strong oscillations in a particular set of frequencies known as the theta-band. What's more, the frequencies coming from the two separate regions of the brain actually synchronized together when the monkeys tried to recall information from their short-term memory. The level of synchronization varied, but the more lined up the two sets of frequencies were, the better the monkeys were at remembering what they had seen. In a statement, first author Stefanie Liebe describes this phenomenon:

"It is as if you have two revolving doors in each of the two areas. During working memory, they get in sync, thereby allowing information to pass through them much more efficiently than if they were out of sync."

It's a really intriguing result, as it helps show how distant regions of the brain can communicate to perform complex acts at breakneck speed. It's pretty amazing to think of a pair of electrical currents whose frequencies are constantly spinning in and out of sync in our brains every time we try to remember something we were looking at five seconds ago.

http://io9.com/5881106/how-does-your-brain-create-short+term-memories

MOVIE: The D Word: Understanding Dyslexia

The D Word: Understanding Dyslexia skillfully explores the complex and often challenging world faced by those who have this disability. The film focuses on high-school senior Dylan as he shares his early struggles in school and prepares to begin studies at the college of his choice. Interviews with other young dyslexics, as well as highly accomplished businesspeople diagnosed with the learning disability, including Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, and California’s Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, are seamlessly incorporated into the story. Two prominent doctors in the field at the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity help demystify and mitigate the stigma surrounding this syndrome.

Focusing on the positive aspects of dyslexia and incorporating creative animation sequences, James Redford’s film emphasizes specific areas where dyslexics excel and suggests thoughtful strategies for their academic success in our often-rigid educational system.

10 Incredibly Strange Brain Disorders

You're used to relying on your brain. Whatever else happens, your personal lump of gray matter will take in the world, and respond to it in a fluid and predictable way. But actually, whatever your brain does is made up of many successive mental steps — and if just one of those steps fails, you'll find yourself behaving very differently.

Here are 10 weird and highly specific brain conditions, and what they each show us about the human brain.

10. Astasia-Abasia Patients Are Always On the Verge of Falling
9. Anosognia Patients Are Unable to Recognize Their Own Injuries 
8. Broca's Aphasia Patients Are Able to Do Everything But Speak
7. Palinopsia Patients Literally Cannot Unsee Things 
6. Dysmimia or Amimia Patients Don't Know if You Give Them the Finger
5. Verbal Dysdecorum Patients Can't Censor Themselves
4. Dysantigraphia Patients Can't Possibly Copy Their Neighbor's Paper 
3. Amelodia Patients Can Never Name That Tune
2. Anhedonia Patients Can't Take Pleasure in Anything 
1. Jargonaphasia Patients Are Makeshift Gertrude Steins


http://io9.com/5874229/10-incredibly-strange-brain-disorders