Coating implantable electronics in the polymer PEDOT can extend their life, which could make cyborgs more common in the future.
Researchers have developed a special polymer coating for electronics implants that make them less abrasive to biological tissue.
A new non-invasive device called MiniTouch provides thermal feedback about the object being touched.
Amputees can regain temperature sensation in their phantom hand thanks to new bionic technology. Researchers from Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPF) are leading this innovation.
They created a non-invasive device called MiniTouch for the study, which provides thermal feedback about the object being touched.
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Jizai Arms.
“Half a century since the concept of a cyborg was introduced, Jizai-bodies (digital cyborgs), enabled by the spread of wearable robotics, are the focus of much research in recent times,” states the company’s website.
It works for retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
Science Corp has conceived of a new bionic eye that targets and cures two diseases that cause blindness. “Today we’re excited to take the covers off of our first flagship product development program: the Science Eye, a visual prosthesis targeted at retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), two forms of serious blindness presently without good options for patients,” said the firm in a post from November 2022.
How does it work? By targeting the functioning of the diseases.
Continue reading “This bionic eye cures diseases that cause blindness” »
The Science Eye’s grand promise is to help restore vision. If it works, we might even be able to manipulate our own reality.
Summary: It may be possible to optimize the stimulation parameters of brain implants in animals without human intervention. The study highlights the potential for autonomous optimization of prostheses implanted in the brain. The advance may prove to be beneficial for those with spinal cord injury and diseases that affect movement.
Source: University of Montreal.
Scientists have long studied neurostimulation to treat paralysis and sensory deficits caused by strokes and spinal cord injuries, which in Canada affect some 380,000 people across the country.
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It’s a step that could one day lead to advances for humans that boost quality of life for many by: giving amputees and those with spinal injuries control of advanced prosthetics, stimulating the sacral nerve to restore bladder control, stimulating the cervical vagus nerve to treat epilepsy and providing deep brain stimulation as a possible treatment for Parkinson’s.
Cameras for machine vision and robotics are essentially bionic devices mimicking human eyes. These applications require advanced color imaging systems to possess a number of attributes such as high resolution, large FoV, compact design, light-weight and low energy consumption, etc1. Conventional imaging systems based on CCD/CMOS image sensors suffer from relatively low FoV, bulkiness, high complexity, and power consumption issues, especially with mechanically tunable optics. Recently, spherical bionic eyes with curved image sensor retinas have triggered enormous research interest1,2,3,4,5,6,7. This type of devices possess several appealing features such as simplified lens design, low image aberration, wide FoV, and appearance similar to that of the biological eyes rendering them suitable for humanoid robots8,9,10,11,12,13. However, the existing spherical bionic eyes with curved retinas typically only have fixed lens and can only acquire mono color images. Fixed lenses cannot image objects with varying distances. On the other hand, conventional color imaging function of CCD/CMOS image sensors are achieved by using color filter arrays, which add complexity to the device fabrication and cause optical loss14,15,16,17,18,19. Typical absorptive organic dye filters suffer from poor UV and high-temperature stabilities, and plasmonic color filters suffer from low transmission20,21,22. And it is even more challenging to fabricate color filter arrays on hemispherical geometry where most traditional microelectronic fabrication methods are not applicable.
Herein, we demonstrate a novel bionic eye design that possesses adaptive optics and a hemispherical nanowire array retina with filter-free color imaging and neuromorphic preprocessing abilities. The primary optical sensing function of the artificial retina is realized by using a hemispherical all-inorganic CsPbI3 nanowire array that can produce photocurrent without external bias leading to a self-powered working mode. Intriguingly, an electrolyte-assisted color-dependent bidirectional synaptic photo-response is discovered in a well-engineered hybrid nanostructure. Inspired by the vertical alignment of a color-sensitive cone cell and following neurons, the device structure vertically integrates a SnO2/NiO double-shell nanotube filled with ionic liquid in the core on top of a CsPbI3/NiO core-shell nanowire. It is found that the positive surrounding gate effect of NiO due to photo hole injection can be partially or fully balanced by electrolyte under shorter (blue) or longer (green and red) wavelength illuminations, respectively. Thus, the device can yield either positive or negative photocurrent under shorter or longer wavelength illumination, respectively. The carriers can be accumulated in SnO2/NiO structure, giving rise to the bidirectional synaptic photo-response. This color-sensitive bidirectional photo-response instills a unique filter-free color imaging function to the retina. The synaptic behavior-based neuromorphic preprocessing ability, along with the self-powered feature, effectively reduce the energy consumption of the system23,24,25,26,27,28. Moreover, the color selectivity of each pixel can be tuned by a small external bias to detect more accurate color information. We demonstrate that the device can reconstruct color images with high fidelity for convolutional neural network (CNN) classifications. In addition, our bionic eye integrates adaptive optics in the device, by integrating an artificial crystalline lens and an electronic iris based on liquid crystals. The artificial crystalline lens can switch focal length to detect objects from different distances, and the electronic iris can control the amount of light reaching the retina which enhances the dynamic range. Both of the optical components can be easily tuned by the electric field, which are fast, compact, and much more energy efficient compared to the conventional mechanically controlled optics reported hitherto. (Supplementary Table 1 compares our system with some commercial zoom lenses.) The combination of all these unique features makes the bionic eye structurally and functionally equivalent to its biological counterpart.
Blackrock’s long-tested NeuroPort® Array, widely considered the gold standard of high-channel neural interfacing, has been used in human BCIs since 2004 and powered many of the field’s most significant milestones. In clinical trials, patients using Blackrock’s BCI have regained tactile function, movement of their own limbs and prosthetics, and the ability to control digital devices, despite diagnoses of paralysis and other neurological disorders.
While Blackrock’s BCI enables patients to execute sophisticated functions without reliance on assistive technologies, next-generation BCIs for areas such as vision and memory restoration, performance prediction, and treatment of mental health disorders like depression will need to interface with more neurons.
Neuralace is designed to capitalize on this need; with 10,000+ channels and the entire scalable system integrated on an extremely flexible lace-structured chip, it could capture data that is orders of magnitude greater than existing electrodes, allowing for an exponential increase in capability and intuitiveness.
Ed Boyden shows how, by inserting genes for light-sensitive proteins into brain cells, he can selectively activate or de-activate specific neurons with fiber-optic implants. With this unprecedented level of control, he’s managed to cure mice of analogs of PTSD and certain forms of blindness. On the horizon: neural prosthetics. Session host Juan Enriquez leads a brief post-talk Q&A.
