Touch Bionics, a “leading developer of advanced upper-limb prosthetics” has just made Time’s list of Top 50 inventions of 2008 (coming it at #14).
What’s so amazing about this invention?
For starters, each finger is powered by its own motor. This allows the wearer to individually move their fingers for more accurate manipulation of objects. It’s made of a high-strength plastic resulting in a prosthetic that is lightweight as well as appealing to the eyes. Maintenance of the hand is also very simple. “The modular construction of the i-LIMB Hand means that each individually powered finger can be quickly removed by simply removing one screw. This means that a prosthetist can easily swap out fingers that require servicing and patients can return to their everyday lives after a short clinic visit.” This way you can still have use of the hand while part of it is getting repaired.
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October 15 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Security Year: 2016 Rating: 3 Hot
A viral marketing campaign unlike any other.
Despite the Second Great Depression, the early 20-teens saw tremendous advances in communication, agriculture, fuel-efficiency, medicine and especially robotics. By 2016, the resurgent world world had become saturated with interactive projected interfaces, smart light-weight vehicles of all shapes and sizes, farm-bots and a variety of human Add-ons that both solved serious illnesses and enabled amazing 
new capabilities. It was not uncommon to encounter citizens with artificial fingers, eyes, hearts, livers and even memory sticks.
Most prevalent and readily visible were prosthetic lower legs that replaced the tibia, ankle and foot. At first these had replaced the damaged limbs of injured human athletes, soldiers, accident victims, and those whose bones had simply worn down, but as the non-cyborg population came to appreciate the tremendous running, jumping and long-distance transport abilities that these Add-ons enabled, a growing number of perfectly healthy citizens decided that they too could benefit by upgrading their limbs. The efficiency increase was simply too great to pass up. Instead of buying a car or leasing certain bots, a person could accomplish the same through elective surgery and incorporation of the iRobot / Stryker co-manufactured lower legs.
As such modifications became all the rage it appeared that humans were rapidly heading toward total body replacement. But then, at 4pm EDT, November 21, 2016 the Crazy Legs virus struck, forever altering the public perception of Add-ons and the prospect of a fully mechanized near-term future.
Perpetrated by anonymous white hat hacktivist “Marty McFly”, Crazy Legs took advantage of a vulnerability in the Ubuntu Body System short-range encryption signal. The blue-tooth signal connecting the artificial legs to the Brain-Ware was compromised and replaced with new instruction codes. The result was an illegal social choreography that reached a never-before seen scale.
Precisely at 4pm every human outfitted with the iRobot/Stryker ver. 2.2 lower limbs started dancing… uncontrollably.
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Tanya Vlach lost her left eye in a car accident in 2005, now she’s appealing to the online community to build her an eye capable of recording video. “I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic / artificial eye.” She gives the dimensions of her current prosthetic and what she wants inside of the replacement.
She believes that it’s possible for the technology of today to construct her an eye that can can record video, take pictures, have a small power source and have a remote trigger (check out the full list here). But it’s not the product she wants which caught my eye (I believe it can be built with current technology) it was her plea to the online community instead of through hospitals. Tanya’s is the first case I’ve heard about where an individual has tried to petition the world to make something that is technologically superior to what’s currently on the market.
Can the online community accomplish this?
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