Finalists Selected for Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize

First announced in 2012, the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE has sought to bring together the best and brightest minds in the field together to make science fiction science fact. In short, they sought to create a handheld device that could would mimic some of the key functions of the iconic Star Trek tricorder, allowing consumers access to reliable, easy to use diagnostic equipment any time, anywhere, with near instantaneous results.

And now, the list of potential candidates has been whittled down to ten finalists. And while they might be able to live up to the fictitious original, the devices being developed are quite innovative and could represent a significant technological advancement in the diagnostic domain. Qualcomm is offering a US$10 million prize purse in the hope of stimulating the research and development of precision diagnostic equipment.

In order to qualify for the prize, the successful scanner must comply with an ambitious set of parameters. First, the device must be able to reliably capture an individual’s heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation in an easy to use and completely non-invasive fashion. It must also diagnose 13 core diseases – including pneumonia, tuberculosis and diabetes – along with three additional health conditions to be chosen by each team.

Each device varies widely in terms of appearance and composition, but that’s hardly surprising. The only limitations placed on the teams in terms of construction is that the entire apparatus must have a mass of less than 2.3kg (5 lb). Due to the wide range of tests needed to be carried out by the tricorder in order to capture the necessary health metrics, it is highly unlikely that any of the scanners will take the form of a single device.

The shortlisted entries include Scanadu (pictured above), a company which is currently developing an entire portfolio of handheld medical devices. The circular sensor is programmed to measure blood pressure, temperature, ECG, oximetry, heart rate, and the breathing rate of a patient or subject – all from a simple, ten second scan. Then there’s Aezon, an American-based team comprised of student engineers from Johns Hopkins University, Maryland.

The Aezon device is made up of a wearable Vitals Monitoring Unit – designed to capture oxygen saturation, blood pressure, respiration rate and ECG metrics – and The Lab Box, a small portable device that makes use of microfluidic chip technology in order to diagnose diseases ranging from streptococcal pharyngitis to a urinary tract infection by analyzing biological samples.

The other finalists include CloudDX, a Canadian company from Mississauga, Ontario; Danvantri, from Chennai, India; DMI from Cambridge, Mass; the Dynamical Biomarkers Group from Zhongli City, Taiwan; Final Frontier Medical Devices from Paoli, PA; MESI Simplifying Diagnostics from Ljubljana, Slovenia; SCANurse from London, England; and the Zensor from Belfast, Ireland.

In all cases, the entrants are compact, lightweight and efficient devices that push the information obtained through their multiple sensors to a smartphone or tablet interface. This appears to be done with a proprietary smartphone app via the cloud, where it can also be analyzed by a web application. Users will also be able to access their test results, discover information regarding possible symptoms and use big data to form a possible diagnosis.

The next and final round of tests for the teams will take place next year between November and December. The scanners will be put through a diagnostic competition involving 15-30 patients whilst judges evaluate the consumers user experience. The final test will also assess the scanners’ adequacy in high-frequency data logging, and the overall winners will be announced in early 2016, and awarded the lucrative $10 million prize to develop their product and bring it to market.

If such a device could be simple enough to allow for self-diagnosis by the general public, it could play a key part in alleviating the pressure on overburdened healthcare systems by cutting down on unnecessary hospital visits. It will also be a boon for personalized medicine, making regular hospital visits quicker, easier, and much less expensive. And let’s not forget, it’s science fiction and Trekky-nerd gold!

Be sure to check out the video below that outlines the aims and potential benefits of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE challenge. And for more information on the finalists, and to see their promotional videos, check out the Qualcomm website here.

Source: gizmag.com, tricorder.xprize.org

The Future is Here: DARPA’s Nervous System Implants

Hard on the heels of their proposed BRAIN initiative – a collaborative research initiative to map the activity of every neuron in the human brain – DARPA has announced a bold new program to develop tiny electronic implants that will be able to interface directly with the human nervous system to control and regulate many different diseases and chronic conditions, such as arthritis, PTSD, Crohn’s disease, and depression.

The program, called ElectRx (pronounced ‘electrics’), ultimately aims to replace medication with “closed-loop” neural implants which monitor the state of your health and then provide the necessary nerve stimulation to keep your organs and biological systems functioning properly. The work is primarily being carried out with US soldiers and veterans in mind, but the technology will certainly percolate down to civilians as well.

The ElectRx program will focus the relatively new area of medical therapies called neuromodulation, which seeks to modulate the nervous system to improve neurological problem. Notable examples of this are cochlear implants which restore hearing by modulating your brain’s auditory nerve system, and deep brain stimulation (DBS) which is apparently capable of curing/regulating conditions like depression and Parkinson’s by overriding erroneous neural spikes.

So far, these implants have been fairly large, which makes implantation fairly invasive and risky. Most state-of-the-art implants also lack precision, with most placing the stimulating electrodes in roughly the right area, but which are unable to target a specific bundles of nerves. With ElectRx, DARPA wants to miniaturize these neuromodulation implants so that they’re the same size as a nerve fiber.

This way they can be implanted with a minimally invasive procedure (through a needle) and attached to specific nerve fibers, for very precise stimulation. While these implants can’t regulate every condition or replace every medication (yet), they could be very effective at mitigating a large number of conditions. A large number of conditions are caused by the nervous system misfiring, like inflammatory diseases, brain and mental health disorders.

Currently, a variety of drugs are used to try and cajole these awry neurons and nerves back in-line by manipulating various neurotransmitters. However, the science behind these drugs is not yet exact, relying heavily on a trial-and-error approach and often involving serious side-effects. Comparatively, an electronic implant that could “catch” the misfire, cleans up the signal, and then retransmits it would be much more effective.

As DARPA’s Doug Weber explained:

The technology DARPA plans to develop through the ElectRx program could fundamentally change the manner in which doctors diagnose, monitor and treat injury and illness. Instead of relying only on medication — we envision a closed-loop system that would work in concept like a tiny, intelligent pacemaker. It would continually assess conditions and provide stimulus patterns tailored to help maintain healthy organ function, helping patients get healthy and stay healthy using their body’s own systems.

Despite requiring a lot of novel technological breakthroughs, DARPA is planning to perform human trials of ElectRx in about five years. The initial goal will be improving the quality of life for US soldiers and veterans. And while they have yet to announce which conditions they will be focusing on, it is expected that something basic like arthritis will be the candidate – though there are expectations that PTSD will become a source sooner other than later.

And this is just the latest neurological technology being developed by DARPA. Earlier in the year, the agency announced a similar program to develop a brain implant that can restore lost memories and experiences. A joint fact sheet released by the Department of Defense and the Veteran’s Association revealed that DARPA also secured 78 million dollars to build the chips as part of the government’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) program.

While DARPA’s ElectRx announcement is purely focused on the medical applications of miniature neural implants, there are of course a variety of other uses that might arise from elective implantation – for soldiers as well as civilians. With a few well-placed implants in a person’s spine, they could flip a switch and ignore any pain reported by your limbs, allowing them to withstand greater physical stress or ignore injuries.

Implants placed in muscle fibers could also provide added electrostimulation to provide extra boosts of raw muscle power. And With precision-placed implants around the right nerve fibers, people could gain manual control of their organs, allowing them to speed up or slow down their hearts, turbo-charge their livers, or tweak just about any other function of their bodies.

The age of the Transhuman looms, people!

Source: extremetech.com, motherboard.vice.com, darpa.mil

The Future is Here: First Brain-to-Brain Interface!

In a first amongst firsts, a team of international researchers have reported that they have built the first human-to-human brain-to-brain interface; allowing two humans — separated by the internet — to consciously communicate with each other. One researcher, attached to a brain-computer interface (BCI) in India, successfully sent words into the brain of another researcher in France, who was wearing a computer-to-brain interface (CBI).

In short, the researchers have created a device that allows people to communicate telepathically. And it’s no surprise, given the immense amount of progress being made in the field. Over the last few years, brain-computer interfaces that you can plug into your computer’s USB port have been commercially available. And in the last couple of years we’ve seen advanced BCIs that can be implanted directly into your brain.

Creating a brain-to-brain connection is a bit more difficult though, as it requires that brain activity not only be read, but inputted into someone else’s brain. Now, however, a team of international researchers have cracked it. On the BCI side of things, the researchers used a fairly standard EEG (electroencephalogram) from Neuroelectrics. For the CBI, which requires a more involved setup, a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) rig was used.

To break the process down, the BCI reads the sender’s thoughts, like to move their hands or feet, which are then broken down into binary 1s and 0s. These encoded thoughts are then transmitted via the internet (or some other network) to the recipient, who is wearing a TMS. The TMS is focused on the recipient’s visual cortex, and it receives a “1″ from the sender, it stimulates a region in the visual cortex that produces a phosphene.

This is a phenomenon whereby a person sees flashes of light, without light actually hitting the retina. The recipient “sees” these phosphenes at the bottom of their visual field, and by decoding the flashes — phosphene flash = 1, no phosphene = 0 — the recipient can “read” the word being sent. While this is certainly a rather complex way of sending messages from one brain to another, for now, it is truly state of the art.

TMS is somewhat similar to TDCS (transcranial direct-current stimulation), in that it can stimulate regions of neurons in your brain. But instead of electrical current, it uses magnetism, and is a completely non-invasive way of stimulating certain sections of the brain and allowing a person to think and feel a certain way. In short, there doesn’t need to be any surgery or electrodes implanted into the user’s brain to make it happen.

This method also neatly sidestep the fact that we really don’t know how the human brain encodes information. And so, for now, instead of importing a “native” message, we have to use our own encoding scheme (binary) and a quirk of the visual cortex. And even if it does seem a little bit like hard work, there’s no denying that this is a conscious, non-invasive brain-to-brain connection.

With some refinement, it’s not hard to imagine a small, lightweight EEG that allows the sender to constantly stream thoughts back to the receiver. In the future, rather than vocalizing speech, or vainly attempting to vocalize one’s own emotions, people could very well communicate their thoughts and feelings via a neural link that is accommodated by simple headbands with embedded sensors.

And imagine a world where instant messaging and video conferencing have the added feature of direct thought sharing. Or an The Internet of Thoughts, where people can transfer terabytes worth of brain activity the same way they share video, messages and documents. Remember, the internet began as a small-scale connection between a few universities, labs and research projects.

I can foresee a similar network being built between research institutions where professors and students could do the same thing. And this could easily be followed by a militarized version where thoughts are communicated instantly between command centers and bunkers to ensure maximum clarity and speed of communication. My how the world is shaping up to be a science fiction novel!

Sources: extremetech.com, neurogadget.com, dailymail.co.uk

Climate Crisis: Solar-Powered Oasis to Feed Desert Cities

Desertification is one of the biggest threats associated with Climate Change. In places like North Africa and the Middle East, where countries already import up to 90% of their food, the spread of the desert due to increasing temperatures and diminished rainfall is made worse by the fact that cities in the region continue to grow. It’s a situation that is getting more expensive and energy-intensive at a time when things need to be getting more cost-effective and sustainable.

Luckily, a team of architects hopes to create a new agricultural system that could grow and deliver food in the desert. It’s called OAXIS, a conceptual design for a modular set of prefab greenhouses, covered in solar panels, which would extend from a city into the desert. The design of the buildings aims to keep out intense summer heat while the solar panels would power the rest of the building’s infrastructure and send extra energy back into the city.

Conceived by Forward Thinking Architecture, a Barcelona-based firm, the concept seeks to combine flexibility with a minimal carbon footprint. Towards this end, they chose to forgo usual transportation and create a unique conveyor system that would deliver produce without the use of any fossil fuels. The conveyor belt would be underground so it could keep running in a straight line even if buildings were in the way.

Inside the prefab greenhouses, farmers would grow crops like tomatoes, lettuce, and strawberries using a hydroponic system that can reduce fertilizers and pesticides and save 80% of the water used in traditional agriculture, in part by recycling and reusing it. As for where the water comes from, the designers suggest that groundwater could supply the farm’s needs, but many Middle Eastern countries already rely on desalination.

Ideally, desert populations would be small enough that the region’s sparse rainfall could support local crops. But that’s not the reality. In addition, a small part of the recycled water would also be used to create an outdoor garden for education. As architect Javier Ponce, principal and founder of Forward Thinking Architecture, explained:

We thought it cannot only be a farming-only building, it must have a pedagogical approach and have to be attractive in order to become a biodiversity hub which can be visited by the local people and visitors… The cities should be smaller, denser, and compact, but this is not the current situation for some of the Arabian peninsula cities since they have exponentially grown and attract more people and workers. There has been a rapid urbanization in the area since the middle of the 20th century.

The project, he hopes, could help supply food as climate change makes the situation even more challenging. Already, countries in the worst-affected regions are desperately looking for solutions. For example, Qatar has already invested hundreds of millions in a plan to grow as much local food as possible by 2030. Other countries in the region, like Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jordan, and the desert-locked Saudi Arabia are expected to follow.

These regions in particular have felt the pressure brought on by the escalating price of importing food. This pressure is exacerbated due to the disappearance of peak oil, which accounted for the vast majority of this region’s wealth. However, the project has farther-reaching implications, as Climate Change threatens to turn much of the world’s arable land into dry, drought-ridden plains.

At the same time, it takes into account the need to reduce reliance on water and fossil-fuels. As our population continues to skyrocket, a smarter and more sustainable use of available resources are always needed. As Ponce explained:

The OAXIS project is an alternative or complementary way to respond to the food insecurity and water scarcity of the region in a self-sufficient way. It aims to help reduce the food imports to feed part of the people in a nearby future based on renewable energies.

And be sure to check out this OAXIS promotional video, courtesy of Forward Thinking Architecture:

Sources: fastcoexist.com, forwardthinkingarchitecture

Ending Parkinsons: Wearables and Cloud Storage

Behind Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease is the second-most widespread neurodegenerative brain disorder in the world, and affects one out of every 100 people over the age of 60. After first being described in 1817 by Dr. James Parkinson, treatment and diagnosis have barely changed. Surgery, medications, and management techniques can help relieve symptoms, but as of yet, there is no cure.

In addition, the causes are not fully understood and appear to vary depending on the individual. But measuring it is often a slow process that doesn’t generate nearly enough data for researchers to make any significant progress. Luckily, Intel recently teamed up with the Michael J. Fox Foundation to and have proposed using wearable devices, coupled with cloud computing, to speed up the data collection process.

Due to the amount of variables involved in Parkinson’s symptoms — speed of movement, frequency and strength of tremors, how it affects sleep, and so on — the symptoms are difficult and tedious to track. Often, data is accrued through patient diaries, which is a slow process. Intel’s plan, which will involve the deployment of smartwatches, can not only increase the rate of data collection, but detect a much higher volume of variables and frequency than a personal diary could.

It is hopes that they will be able to record 300 observations per second, thus creating a massive amount of data per patient. The use of wearables means that the data can even be reported and monitored by researchers and doctors in real time. Later this year, the MJFF is even planning on launching a mobile app that adds medication intake monitoring and allows patients to record how they feel, making personal diaries easier to create and share.

In order to collect and manage the data, it will be uploaded to a cloud storage data platform, and has the ability to notice changes in the data in real time. This allows researchers to track the changes in patient symptoms and share from a large field of data to better spot common patterns and symptoms. In the end, its not quite a cure, but it should help speed up the process of finding one.

Wearable technology, cloud computing and wireless data monitoring are the hallmarks of personalized medicine, which appears to be the way of the future. And while the concept of metadata and keeping medical information in centralized databases may make some nervous (as it raises certain privacy issues), keeping it anonymous and about the symptoms should lead to a speedy development of treatments and ever cures.

And be sure to check out this video from the intelnewsroom, explaining the collaboration in detail:

Source: extremetech.com

Tech for the Developing World: Inflatable Incubators

One of the greatest challenges to combating problems in the developing world – like disease and infant mortality – is the fact that the necessary infrastructure and equipment isn’t always available. This is especially the case in war-torn Syria, where premature babies are dying due to a lack of incubating equipment. Hence why James Roberts came up with his Inflatable Incubator, a cheap and easy-to-transport neonatal device.

Designed to look like an accordion-like instrument known as a concertina, each end of the inflatable shell case contains electronics, including a ceramic heater, some fans, a humidifier, and an Arduino computer. The collapsible middle section extends out and can be inflated into a bed. As Roberts explained:

This allows the incubator to fit into a very compact space for storage or transportation, but still offer the same volume of a first world incubator when inflated for the child’s comfort.

The idea came to him after Roberts saw a video about child death in Syrian refugee camps and he decided to develop the idea as part of a final year project at a British university. So far, there are two prototypes: a purely functional clear plastic box that demonstrates the technology, and an “aesthetic” version that shows off what the product will eventually look like. Roberts is now trying to interest charities in adopting the project.

There are already cheap baby-warming products aimed at the developing world, such as the Embrace – a clever sleeping bag that can maintain a 37° C (98° F)temperature for up to four hours. Roberts’s idea has a few extra features, like a humidity sensor, a temperature probe, and LED lights for nighttime use. The design was also entered in this year’s Dyson Awards, an international student design award program that rewards problem-solving ideas.

To Roberts, his invention is not just about offering a solution to a problem that all-too-common in certain regions of the world. It’s also about addressing a technology gap that has existed for far too long. As he explained it:

Neonatal intensive care units have been around since 1922. So why, almost 100 years later is this still a huge problem in some parts of the world? I believe my design helps solve this problem and could allow for certain children to gain a positive start in life, greatly decreasing the numbers of premature child deaths throughout refugee camps.

As always, its a question of access. And making technologies more accessible in the developing world is one of the greatest challenges facing modern researchers and developers.

Source: fastcoexist.com

News from Space: Dream Chaser Airframe Unveiled

With the cancellation of the Space Shuttle program, and the termination of NASA’s operations with the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), NASA has been pushing ahead with several programs designed to restore their access to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station (ISS). One such program is the Dream Chaser, a joint venture between the Sierra Nevada Corporation and Lockheed Martin that aims to create a winged mini-shuttle.

Earlier this month, the program reached an important milestone when the composite airframe structure was unveiled at a joint press conference by Sierra Nevada Corporation and Lockheed Martin at the Fort Worth facility. The assembly of the airframe took place at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New Orleans, where Lockheed Martin is busy fabricating the structural components for the composite structure.

From here, the completed components are shipped to Lockheed Martin’s Aeronautics facility in Fort Worth, Texas for integration into the airframe and assembly. Designed to be launched into orbit atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket and then fly back and land on its power, the Dream Chaser will carry a mix of cargo and up to a seven crewmembers to the ISS before landing on commercial runways anywhere in the world.

According to Mark N. Sirangelo, corporate vice president of Sierra Nevada’s Space Systems, the company chose to partner with Lockheed Martin because of its long history in the development of commercial aerospace technology:

As a valued strategic partner on SNC’s Dream Chaser Dream Team, Lockheed Martin is under contract to manufacture Dream Chaser orbital structure airframes… We competitively chose Lockheed Martin because they are a world leader in composite manufacturing, have the infrastructure, resources and quality control needed to support the needs of an orbital vehicle and have a proven track record of leading our nation’s top aviation and aerospace programs. Lockheed Martin’s diverse heritage coupled with their current work on the Orion program adds an extra element of depth and expertise to our program. SNC and Lockheed Martin continue to expand and develop a strong multi-faceted relationship.

Dream Chaser measures about 9 meters (29 feet) long with a 7 meter (23 foot) wide wing span, and is about one third the size of the Space Shuttle Endeavor and all other NASA orbiters – which were retired beginning in 2011. Upon completion of the airframe manufacturing at Ft Worth, it will be transported to SNC’s Louisville, Colorado, facility for final integration and assembly.

SNC announced in July that they successfully completed and passed a series of risk reduction milestone tests on key flight hardware systems that brought the private reusable spacecraft closer to its critical design review (CDR) and first flight. The Sierra Nevada Corporation is now moving ahead with plans for the Dream Chaser’s first launch and unmanned orbital test flight in November of 2016, which will take place atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Dream Chaser is among a trio of US private sector manned spaceships being developed with seed money from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program in a public/private partnership to develop a next-generation crew transportation vehicle to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2017 – a capability totally lost following the space shuttle’s forced retirement in 2011.

These include the SpaceX Dragon and Boeing CST-100 ‘space taxis’, which are also vying for funding in the next round of contracts to be awarded by NASA around September 2014. Between a reusable mini-shuttle, a reusable space capsule, and reusable rockets, NASA not only hopes to restore indigenous space capability, but to drastically cut costs on future space missions.

Source: universetoday.com

The Future is Here: Injectable Foam for the Battlefield

Given the advances in medical technology, it is quite surprising when it comes to gunshot wounds and battlefield injuries, old-world methods are still be used. For example, if a soldier is wounded in an extremity such as the the arm of leg, bandages and/or tourniquets should suffice. But for wounds that occur center mass, or at the junction of an extremity (neck, groin, or shoulder), stopping the flow of blood usually involves simply packing the wound with gauze.

However, in recent months, new and improved solutions have been developed. The first was the XStat, a new type of syringe that contains hundreds of injectable sponges that was developed by a former Special Ops medic and his Oregon-based startup, RevMedX. Similarly, former military and trauma surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital have been working on Wound Stasis Technology, an injectable foam that is fed into the stomach to stop internal bleeding.

And now, a group of students from Johns Hopkins University are working on a hardening foam that can be injected directly into flesh wounds to stop the bleeding. Combining the best of both worlds, the concept involves using a plastic syringe that contains two liquids – polyol and a diisocyanatein – that form a polyurethane foam that expands to fill the wound cavity and then hardens.

This hardened foam not only seals the wound shut, but applies pressure to stop the bleeding. Additionally, while still in its liquid state, the foam is able to run deep and thoroughly into the cavity. This is important, as it’s often difficult to find the sources of blood loss in such injuries, and then apply clotting agents to them. And once the soldier is evacuated to a hospital, the foam is easily removed.

As Sydney Rooney, the student team leader of the John Hopkins research team, said in an interview with Gizmag:

Since the wound will have to be debrided extensively anyway [have its damaged tissue removed], we are not anticipating any issue in that regard. We are still testing it so we don’t know the final answer, but our physicians aren’t anticipating for it to be a problem. Ideally, most of the block will be removed in one chunk.

When addressing the army’s Wound Stasis Technology, which is currently being developed with the help of DARPA, Rooney claimed that there system is different. Whereas the DARPA system is designed for internal bleeding, applying the same methodology to surface wounds would be impractical. Hence their particular brand of injectable foam, which expands to a degree to stop “junctional bleeds”.

Or as he explained it:

Their foam expands to a way larger size and more aggressively than many a junctional bleed permits. Since the stomach expands, their foam expands by 30 times and it doesn’t matter, whereas if you put it in, say, a junctional neck wound, it could apply too much pressure.

The Johns Hopkins device has so far been tested on flesh-simulating gel containing artificial blood vessels, with animal trials planned to take place next. By the time it comes to market, it will be well positioned alongside DARPA’s WST foam for treating battlefield wounds. It may come up against the XStat for treating flesh wounds, but room certainly exists from similar products given the sheer number of wounds on the battlefield.

And given the amount of gun-related violence in the United States and around the world, these inventions will certainly be welcomed by trauma surgeons and police forces once they trickle down to the civilian market. And in the meantime, be sure to check out this cool video from John Hopkins University, where Rooney and her team present their new invention:

Sources: gizmag.com, releases.jhu.edu

Flash Forward Is Done!

After many months on the back burner, I finally took a big step while house-sitting for my family this weekend and completed Flash Forward. For those who don’t know, this book is an anthology of short sci-fi stories I did back in April of 2013, with a few additions from both before and after. All told, it works out to 19 short stories, 140 pages, and just over 51,000 words.

For some time, I had been wanting to do some fiction that explored the world of emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, autonomous machines, space exploration and the coming Technological Singularity. And a project involving a short story a day for 26 days was just the excuse I needed. After collecting the resulting stories together, I grouped them into three parts based on common time period and theme.

Part I: Transitions deals with the near future, where climate change, militarized borders, and explosive growth in portables, social media, and synthetic foods will have a major effect on life. Part II: Convergence deals with the ensuing decades, where space exploration, artificial intelligence, digital sentience, and extropianism will become the norm and fundamentally alter what it is to live, work, and be human.

And Part III: Infinitum finishes things off, looking to the distant future where the seed of humanity is planted amongst the distant stars and our species passes the existential singularity. It was fun to write, but what I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time is the chance to hold a physical copy. Somehow, that’s always the best moment of the whole creative process for me. Seeing the book in print, as a real, physical thing you can touch and leaf through.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to edit, a million and one ideas for critical revision to consider, and a whole heap of what Aldous Huxley referred to as “Chronic Remorse” to deal with. Writing, huh? There’s a reason not everybody does it!

The Future is Here: Shipbuilder Robotic Exosuit

With numerous prototypes in development, it seems like just a matter of time before the industrial robotic exoskeleton becomes an everyday reality. Between NASA, the US armed forces, Panasonic, and now Daewoo, the range of powered robot suits seems virtually limitless. And Daewoo, the South-Korean manufacturing giant, now appears to be a step ahead of the competition, having already tested its prototype suits last year.

The test took place at a sprawling shipyard in Okpo-dong in South Korea, where workers dressed in wearable robotics were hefting large hunks of metal, pipes and other objects. It was all part of a test by Daewoo’s Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering facility, where workers strapped into 28kg (62 pound) aluminum alloy, steel and carbon fiber suits called the RoboShipbuilder that supported their own weight plus an additional 30kg (66 pounds).

Anyone between 160 and 185cm tall (5 feet 2 inches and 6 feet) fits the suit, and it has three hours of battery life. Straps across the legs, feet and chest secure the wearer, and the RoboShipbuilder runs on hydraulic joints and electric motors, with the power source tucked inside a backpack. And, because the suit bears most of the weight of the heavy objects, wearers have much finer control over what they are handling.

Gilwhoan Chu, the lead engineer for the firm’s research and development arm, says the pilot showed that the exoskeleton does help workers perform their tasks. Worker feedback was mostly positive, but their were comments that the suit could be faster and be bale to carry more weight. Chu and his team are working towards this, hoping to increase the robot’s lift capacity to 100 kilograms (220 pounds).

The prototypes still have several important kinks to be worked out as well. In tests, workers had a hard time negotiating sloping or slippery surfaces. And the prototypes cannot yet cope with twisting motions, so workers making turns while carrying heavy objects could tire out easily. But South Korea’s vast shipbuilding market is committed to merging human oversight with automation, and Daewoo is hardly alone in working towards this goal.

Earlier this year, the Panasonic subsidiary Activelink is developing an exosuit known as the Powered Loader – a deliberate homage to the Caterpillar P-5000 Powered Work Loader from Aliens fame. According to Activelink, the Power Loader will enable a human to lift up to 100 kilos (220 pounds) and run at speeds up to 8 kilometers (5 miles) per hour, and will be powered by lithium ion battery packs that will provide several hours worth of power.

The exoskeleton will initially be deployed in construction work, nuclear power plants, and emergency situations, but the company has big plans for the future. Activelink would like to develop an exosuit that can fit under a spacesuit or diving gear for underwater and space exploration purposes. The Power Loader appears to be a full-body version of creations like the battery-powered robotic Titan Arm, which won the 2013 James Dyson Award.

The Titan Arm augments arm strength by 18 kg (40 pounds), helping rehabilitate people with back injuries and assisting those lifting objects as part of their daily work. The price for Panasonic’s strength suit is currently projected to be 500,000 yen (around $4,940), and Panasonic says it wants to bring the suits to market by next year. It’s an exciting time to be alive, where a once-feverish dream of science fiction fanatics is fast becoming reality!

And who knows? By the 2020’s, we might even be seeing something along the lines of this in active service:

"Get away from her you bitch!" — “Get away from her you bitch!”

And be sure to watch this video of the Power Loader exoskeleton being tested:

Sources: newscientist.com, cnet.com, (2), jamesdysonfoundation.com

Stories by Williams

Classic sci-fi books, reviews, and the best of from a dedicated fan and author!

Category: Technology

The Future is Here: DARPA’s Nervous System Implants

The Future is Here: First Brain-to-Brain Interface!

Climate Crisis: Solar-Powered Oasis to Feed Desert Cities

Tech for the Developing World: Inflatable Incubators

News from Space: Dream Chaser Airframe Unveiled

The Future is Here: Shipbuilder Robotic Exosuit

Classic sci-fi books, reviews, and the best of from a dedicated fan and author!

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