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(Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a robotic arm for amputees that is named for the "Star Wars" character Luke Skywalker and can perform multiple, simultaneous movements, a huge advance over the metal hook currently in use.

The FDA said on Friday it allowed the sale of the DEKA Arm System after reviewing data, including a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs study in which 90 percent of people who used the device were able to perform complex tasks. These included using keys and locks, feeding themselves, using zippers and brushing and combing hair.

The prosthetic arm was developed by New Hampshire-based DEKA Research and Development Corp, founded by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and other devices.

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said it provided more than $40 million in funding to DEKA to develop the robotic arm as part of a $100 million project to improve prosthetics. "It was designed to produce near-natural upper extremity control to injured people who have suffered amputations. This arm system has the same size, weight, shape and grip strength as an adult's arm would be able to produce," Justin Sanchez, a program manager in DARPA's biological technologies office, said in a telephone interview.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/09/us-usa-health-arm-idUSKBN0DP1ID20140509

Toinen artikkeli samasta aiheesta.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/fda-app...onvert-muscle-signals-complex-movement-281578

 
Kvanttinavikointi kumoaa perinteisen satelliittipohjaisen säätämisen.

IN 2016 a British submarine will slip its moorings and set sail under the guidance of the quantum world. The navigation system it will be testing should record the vessel's position with 1000 times more accuracy than anything before.

If successful, the system, known as quantum positioning, could be miniaturised for use in aircraft, trains, cars and even cellphones. This would provide a backup navigation tool in cities' concrete canyons, or in autonomous vehicles, where a loss of GPS signal can be dangerous.

GPS doesn't work underwater, so submarines navigate using accelerometers to register every twist and turn of a vessel after it submerges and loses its last positioning fix. But this isn't very accurate.

"Today, if a submarine goes a day without a GPS fix we'll have a navigation drift of the order of a kilometre when it surfaces," says Neil Stansfield at the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down. "A quantum accelerometer will reduce that to just 1 metre."

To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield's team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force – and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.



The DSTL team wants this set-up to be usable in the real-world setting of a submarine, where the size of the force would correspond to the movements as the sub swings around in the sea.

Their prototype quantum accelerometer, which resembles a 1-metre-long shoe box, will be trialled on land in September 2015, the team will say at a conference at the UK National Physical Laboratory in Teddington this week. It will initially operate along just one axis, before two more sets of lasers and trapped atoms are added to accommodate motion in all three dimensions. Each will cool 1 million atoms of rubidium. "Once we have understood the first generations, we'll start to miniaturise it for other applications," says Stansfield.

It's not a done deal yet, though, because the accelerometer can't distinguish between tiny gravitational effects and accelerations caused by a vessel's movement. "If the submarine passes an underwater mountain whose gravity attracts it to the west, that feels exactly like an acceleration to the east," says Edward Hinds at the Centre for Cold Matter at Imperial College London, who is developing the accelerometer for the DSTL. "This means that very good gravity maps will be required to navigate correctly."

The DSTL isn't alone in pursuing quantum navigation: teams in the US, China and Australia are chasing the same prize.

"Super-accurate navigation makes sleeping easier for the captain of a submarine," says John Powis, head of the NATO Submarine Rescue Service in Faslane, UK, and a former navigator on Royal Navy submarines. It will also make it easier to go on patrol undetected, as submarines will no longer have to expose a mast to GPS, he says.

But Powis thinks this technology may have the greatest impact in future generations of weapons – once it has shrunk down in size. "The submarine does not need to know its position in metres and centimetres," he says. "But a projectile like a missile or shell might."

The DSTL team believes the technology has applications beyond warfare, though."Ten to 20 years ago this would have needed a huge cryogenic cooler, but laser-cooled atom clouds are changing all that," says team leader Stephen Till. He says future generations of the technology are likely to make their way into everything from cars to our smartphones. "We're convinced the size and power will come down for broad use."
http://www.newscientist.com/article...tem-steps-in-when-gps-fails.html#.U3SM6CgUz08
 
Apinatestit onnistuivat joten nyt uskalletaan kokeilla ihmisillä.
A DARPA-funded research team has demonstrated for the first time in a human a technology that allows an individual to experience the sensation of touch directly in the brain through a neural interface system connected to a robotic arm. By enabling two-way communication between brain and machine—outgoing signals for movement and inbound signals for sensation—the technology could ultimately support new ways for people to engage with each other and with the world.

The work was supported by DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, and performed by the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
 
Nyt pästiin toiseen vaiheeseen noiden high-tech tekokäsien kanssa.
The holiday season is bringing high-tech offerings for U.S. war veterans this year in the form of sophisticated bionic arms developed under the direction of DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. In a ceremony December 22 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) in Bethesda, Md., Justin Sanchez, Director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, delivered the first two advanced “LUKE” arms from a new production line—shiny evidence that the fast-track DARPA research effort has completed its transition into a commercial enterprise. As part of that transition process, DARPA is collaborating with WRNMMC to make the advanced prostheses available to Service members and veterans who are rehabilitating after suffering upper-limb loss.

The LUKE Arm ("Life Under Kinetic Evolution") is the first commercially available FDA-approved robotic prosthetic arm. It is manufactured by Mobius Bionics LLC of Manchester, N.H.
 
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Sony aikoo keskittyä Eurooppaan ja Japaniin puhelimien myynnissä. Melkoisen nihkeää Sonyn tarjonta täkäläisissäkin kaupoissa eivätkä ole ilmeisesti muuttamassa olematonta strategiaansa mihinkään suuntaan.
Sony held a corporate strategy day earlier today, detailing its medium-term plans for the business to FY 2020 (31 March 2021). An update on each of the businesses was given, including the Electronics Products & Solutions Segment (EP&S) which now houses the mobile communication (MC) business under its umbrella. There wasn’t much new information within what was presented. Sony confirmed it wants MC to be profitable by FY 2020, by reducing operating costs by 50 percent (vs FY 2017). It also aims to leverage its reorganisation under the EP&S segment to strengthen its product appeal for smartphones. It highlights the Xperia 1 as the first example of this.
 
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