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But if you’re ninty-five, does it help you feel younger? Probably not. AGNES, a sophisticated suit developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is designed to help people understand through personal experience what it’s like to get old:
AGNES simulates a gerontological atmosphere in retail, public transportation, and workplace environments. Braces and bands mimic joint stiffness and muscular fatigue. Leg straps create slower leg movements, and helmet attachments give the wearer an age-induced curved spine. Yellow eyeglasses make it difficult to read small print, and earplugs simulate difficulty with sounds and tones.
Video at the link.
Link -via Geekosystem | Project Website | Photo: MIT
Imagine glasses that can read body language and offer suggestions about how you should respond, or goggles which can scan faces and call up criminal databases to find a real time match. These snazzy high tech specs aren’t just science fiction props anymore, and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are sure that their “social x-ray specs” are going to find a multitude of uses in society, from communicating more effectively with Autistic people to becoming human lie detectors and much more. Read all about it at NewScientist.
(image courtesy of Ryan Heuser via Wikimedia Commons)
Researchers at MIT developed the Copenhagen Wheel — an electric motor that they say can attach to almost any bicycle. The team says:
There is no external wiring or bulky battery packs, making it retrofittable into any bike. Inside the hub, we have arranged a motor, 3-speed internal hub gear, batteries, a torque sensor, GPRS and a sensor kit that monitors CO, NOx, noise (db), relative humidity and temperature. In the future, you will be able to spec out your wheel according to your riding habits and needs.
Users can also dock a smartphone to the Copenhagen Wheel to control how much assistance the electric motor provides.
Remember how Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report was able to interact with a computer using gloves? MIT student Robert Wang has developed something similar.
Other prototypes of low-cost gestural interfaces have used reflective or colored tape attached to the fingertips, but “that’s 2-D information,” says Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who developed the new system together with Jovan Popovi?, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “You’re only getting the fingertips; you don’t even know which fingertip [the tape] is corresponding to.” Wang and Popovi?’s system, by contrast, can translate gestures made with a gloved hand into the corresponding gestures of a 3-D model of the hand on screen, with almost no lag time. “This actually gets the 3-D configuration of your hand and your fingers,” Wang says. “We get how your fingers are flexing.”
The most obvious application of the technology, Wang says, would be in video games: Gamers navigating a virtual world could pick up and wield objects simply by using hand gestures. But Wang also imagines that engineers and designers could use the system to more easily and intuitively manipulate 3-D models of commercial products or large civic structures.
Wang’s team also made a pretty funny promotional video.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: Jason Dorfman/CSAIL
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A negative pressure pump is a wound therapy device common to nations with advanced medical care. They normally cost $100 a day to rent, which is far too expensive for many patients and hospitals in developing nations. MIT student Danielle Zurovcik invented one that costs a total $3 and can be powered with only 14 microwatts:
But Zurovcik, inspired by a burn surgeon’s plea, went a step further, designing a human-powered device that applies pressure via a simple bellows pump weighing less than half a pound. By improving the seal around the wound dressing to reduce air leaks, Zurovcik cut the pump’s power requirements from about 14 watts to 80 microwatts, which comes from a hand pump.
“To basically take a toilet plunger and produce negative pressure over a prolonged period of time, that is really great,” says Kristian Olson, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, who was not involved in the project. “Not only do I see it answering this need in developing countries, I think it could really enhance home therapy for chronic wounds in the U.S.”
The device is now in use in Haiti.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: Danielle Zurovcik
Researchers at at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been working since the 1990s on helicopters that can navigate indoor spaces autonomously. This one won the 2009 AUVSI Aerial Robotics Competition. Laser scanners and cameras allow it to move through a building on its own. Potential applications include industrial inspection and disaster rescue in hazardous locations.
Contest Page via Popular Science
Priya Ganapati writes in Wired that researchers at MIT are developing an eye implant that can feed visual imput past damaged cells and directly into the brain. Patients will wear a camera that downloads images into the implant:
It won’t entirely restore normal vision, say the researchers, but it will offer just enough sight to help a blind person navigate a room.[...]
Here’s how the implant works. The glasses that patients wear contains a coil that can wirelessly transmit power to receiving coils surrounding the eyeball. The eyeball holds a microchip encased in a sealed titanium case to avoid damage from water seepage. The chip receives visual information and activates electrodes that in turn fire the nerve cells that carry visual input to the brain.
Image: flickr user Orange Acid, used under Creative Commons license.
With sound sources bouncing off walls and other surfaces, how is the brain able to sort out from what direction and distance sound is traveling? Robert Goodier explains:
In an April study, neuroscientists led by Sasha Devore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested the widely held hypothesis that specialized cells in the brain actively suppress neuronal response to echoes. Using electrodes in a cat’s midbrain, researchers measured cells’ responses to a sound and its reverberations. They found that the cells that sense a sound’s direction of origin responded more strongly to the first 50 milliseconds of sound waves than they did to the later waves—their activity simply tapered off after the onset of the sound. The tapering response, a much simpler mechanism than the earlier theory of suppression, allows the brain to easily tune in to original sounds and pinpoint who or what is making noise.
Image by flickr user mystical child used under creative commons license
