FROM LA TIMES

FDA expedites review of robotic arm


The lifelike limb, controlled by a chip planted on the brain, is being tested as part of a program designed to speed development of medical devices.



Reporting from Washington — Responding to the needs of badly wounded war veterans, federal officials said Tuesday they were accelerating reviews of a science-fiction-like robotic arm controlled by a computer chip on the brain.

The device would make the use of prosthetic arms, hands and fingers seem almost natural by using a microchip implanted on the brain to record and decode signals to neurons that control the prosthesis.

In a dramatic video accompanying the announcement by the Food and Drug Administration, the prosthetic arm wielded pliers and picked up a clothespin to demonstrate its dexterity.

The system, developed over the last five years at a cost of more than $100 million by the Pentagon's advanced technology research program, will become the first to be reviewed under a new FDA program designed to make promising medical devices available sooner.

The program seeks to quickly identify and nurture technology that has the potential to transform medical care and the way it is delivered to patients.

The development and review of new drugs and devices typically takes so long and is so expensive that some critics of the process have called it a graveyard for innovation.

"We must turn what has long been considered the valley of death into the pathway to success," said Jeffrey Shuren, head of the FDA's office of medical devices.

The silver and black arm can rotate, twist and bend 27 different ways, mimicking the action of a natural limb, said Geoffrey Ling, program manager for the revolutionizing prosthetics program run by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.


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FROM BBC NEWS

Catholic church gives blessing to iPhone app

UPDATE: POPE BANS APP

Pope Benedict XVI has said Catholics should use digital technologies responsibly

The Catholic Church has approved an iPhone app that helps guide worshippers through confession.

The Confession program has gone on sale through iTunes for £1.19 ($1.99).

Described as "the perfect aid for every penitent", it offers users tips and guidelines to help them with the sacrament.

Now senior church officials in both the UK and US have given it their seal of approval, in what is thought to be a first.

The app takes users through the sacrament - in which Catholics admit their wrongdoings - and allows them to keep track of their sins.

It also allows them to examine their conscience based on personalised factors such as age, sex and marital status - but it is not intended to replace traditional confession entirely.

Instead, it encourages users to understand their actions and then visit their priest for absolution.

Our desire is to invite Catholics to engage in their faith through digital technology”

Patrick LeinenLittle iApps"Our desire is to invite Catholics to engage in their faith through digital technology," Patrick Leinen of developer Little iApps told Reuters.

The launch comes shortly after Pope Benedict XVI gave urging to Christians to embrace digital communication and make their presence felt online.

In his World Communications Address on 24 January, he said it was not a sin to use social networking sites - and particularly encouraged young Catholics to share important information with each other online.

"I invite young people above all to make good use of their presence in the digital world," he said.

He warned them to keep in mind that digital communication was part of a bigger picture, however.

"It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives."

The app guides users through different elements of the sacramentConfession's developers, who are based in Indiana, said they took the Pope's words to heart when they were preparing the application for public consumption.


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FROM THE TELEGRAPH

Zap to the brain 'helps solve puzzles'

Zapping the brain with an electrical current can help people solve difficult problems, scientists have claimed.


Researchers in Australia found that volunteers who received electrical stimulation of the brain's anterior temporal lobes were three times more likely to be able to figure out an unfamiliar puzzle than those who did not get a zap.

Richard Chi and Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney said the current can provide people with a flash of inspiration under pressure.

They explained that people often find it difficult to be creative because they continue to adopt practices that have been successful before.

However, they believed that an electrical current can stimulate parts of the brain that help us solve problems and encouraging us to be more creative.

The scientists said that the use of "transcranial direct current stimulation" alters the activity of populations of brain cells, manipulating competition between the right and left sides of the brain.


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What is RoboEarth?

At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment.

Bringing a new meaning to the phrase "experience is the best teacher", the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.

RoboEarth will include everything needed to close the loop from robot to RoboEarth to robot. The RoboEarth World-Wide-Web style database will be implemented on a Server with Internet and Intranet functionality. It stores information required for object recognition (e.g., images, object models), navigation (e.g., maps, world models), tasks (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies) and hosts intelligent services (e.g., image annotation, offline learning).

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FROM CNET
Robots help sick kids go to school


Children too sick to go to school are still getting an education--thanks to robots in the classroom that transmit lessons back to the student.

Stepan Supin, 12, of Moscow has been battling leukemia for two years, and his immune system is so weak he can't leave home. However, telepresence technology allows him to go to school via remote-controlled robot.

The R.BOT 100 was developed by Moscow's 3Detection Labs several years ago, and it's been helping Stepan study history, geography, and languages since September.

Priced at roughly $3,000, the R.BOT 100 moves around on a wheeled base and has a display, Web cam, microphone, speakers, and an Internet link so Stepan can interact with his classmates and teacher.

"I can change the robot's speed, to go slower or faster. I can move his head to look left or right. I really feel as if I am in the classroom," Stepan told Australia's Herald Sun.

In Texas, Lyndon Baty also goes to school through a robot surrogate. He suffers from polycystic kidney disease and has a severely impaired immune system, which confines him to home.

Lyndon attends class with the Vgo telepresence robot, which was released last year by Vgo Communications. With two-way video, audio, and a 10-hour battery, Vgo lets Lyndon roam around the halls of Knox City High School and interact with other students (see the video below).

"I never thought when I was sick that I would ever have any interaction, much less this kind. It is just like I am there in the classroom," Lyndon said.

Priced around $6,000, the Vgo is much cheaper than Anybots' QB robot. With more and more telepresence bots coming out, will they become as common and cheap as laptops? If so, getting that magical doctor's note that lets you stay home might not mean too much anymore.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20030156-1.html#ixzz1CsIEwnqy

FROM FAST COMPANY


The Future According to Schmidt: "Augmented Humanity," Integrated Into Google
BY KIT EATONTue Jan 25, 2011


In the future we will be Google, and Google will be us--the online giant will make us better humans. That's according to soon-to-be ex-CEO Eric Schmidt speaking today at DLD 11 conference in Germany.

Schmidt announced this week that he's departing his role as Google's CEO, and then it emerged he was winning a $100 million golden parachute as a thank-you for his time in charge of one of the world's most important tech companies. Perhaps that's why he felt he could reveal some of his forecasts for the future at Google. A future he was careful to note he'll be involved in (promising he'll be at Google for at least "the next decade").

After some preamble about his time at Google, Schmidt got to the good stuff: The future is mobile, he thinks, driven by the "device of our time," the smartphone--and the tablet. Children now have two states of existence, aided by this trend--"asleep or online." Within two years Schmidt sees smartphone sales outstripping desktop PC sales, and the mobile sector is growing eight times faster than traditional PCs did at the same stage in their evolution. Soon the majority of online action will happen from mobile devices, and landlines will effectively be dead for phone-call purposes.

Then Schmidt got brave: Unconnected devices today are "no longer interesting," he thinks. Soon everything, but everything, will be hooked up to everything over wireless nets. A good example of the phenomena this enables, Schmidt said, is Google's recent efforts at a spoken-word universal speech translator app--which connects to many, many servers over the Net to give you access to near real-time voice recognition and translation.

So far so good, but then came the most fascinating bit of the whole speech. Computers, Schmidt thinks, can, when used ubiquitously and interactively and with cloud-like access to remote supercomputer powers can give us "senses" we didn't know were possible. "Think of it as augmented humanity" he suggested.

That's Augmented humanity. Not augmented reality, an idea we've been getting used to. It's a subtle twist but an important one. Many tools may be trusted to "augment reality" to appeal to a more digitally interactive culture--you could be happy using Layar on your phone to find a nearby beach, then Around.Me to find a good bar, Yelp to find a restaurant, and Word Lens to live-translate the foreign language menu for you. It's an interactive process, driven by consumer choice.

But augmented humanity implies inserting tech deliberately in the way of normal life, to better it. And Schmidt's unspoken line is that job should fall to Google--it has diverse tools that operate in all of these "augmented info" spaces and beyond, and if they were all centralized and presented to you seamlessly via Android smartphones, then it could improve the human race. After all, thanks to its vast user-info databases, Google already knows pretty much everything about you, and almost what you're thinking about where you're going next (as Schmidt has previously noted.) He caveated his argument with lots of references to the phrase "with your permission," obviously concerned he was overstepping the user-privacy boundary. But do we trust Google with the future of 21st century humankind? There's a big assumption here that Google will always promise not to be evil.

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