RNID, a UK charity for the deaf, argues that millions more hard of hearing people could benefit from implants if they were more affordable. Three firms dominate the market: Cochlear Ltd, Advanced Bionics Corporation and Med-El Corporation, and their implants are made by hand instead of industrially resulting in a $25,000 per unit cost. RNID argues that modernized manufacturing would dramatically lower costs and increase access.
New Scientist, the University of Michigan and PhysOrg report on a new implant for the deaf that sends signals to the aural nerves, instead of to the cochlea as current cochlear implants do. The curvature of the cochlea makes it hard to implant electrodes beyond the higher frequencies in the outer spiral and give a generally muffled sound, making it hard to appreciate music or filter out background noise. The new implants restore hearing in much lower frequencies and with a much cleaner discrimination of signal. The research, on deafened cats, is reported in the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.
Wired eyes and ears would come in very handy in the future as Charlie Stross imagines it, in which we will all “lifelog,” record every minute of our lives. Some trends, he notes, are sigmoidal, plateauing after a steep period of increase. For instance, the average speed of travel sped up from the 19th to 20th century, and has now plateaued. Computing and communications may still be in the increase phase, and may plateau when the physical limits of computational miniaturization are reached. But in two decades he predicts that consumers will have access to terabytes of storage.
That’s enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I’m awake. All the time. It’s a life log; replay it and you’ve got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017.
Why would anyone want to do this?
I can think of several reasons. Initially, it’ll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it’d be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it’s a memory prosthesis.
Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it’s all indexed and searchable. “What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?”
Think of it as google for real life.
…with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let’s say — we’re going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who’s ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.
…Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.
New Body
The Free Geek offers a wonderful summary of accessible ways to meld oneself with the technosphere:
New Scientist and Technology Review report on research by Berkeley chemist Peidong Yang on guiding the growth of embryonic stem cells with embedded nanowires. The growing cells wrapped around and incorporated the wires, which in turn modulated their growth. Yang argues that the technique may permit engineering of the cells into neural, muscle or organ tissues. Other groups have shown that nanowires can be used to electrically communicate with neural and muscle cells, which is the next step for Yang.
Texas Instruments is developing a gastric pacemaker to reinforce fullness signals from the stomach. This article also reports on research in Texas on neural-computer devices for restoring sight and controlling prosthetic limbs, and remote sensing and auto-treatment of cardiac arrhythmias and hypertension. Firms are excited by the lower regulatory hurdles for bio-mechanical devices compared to pharmaceuticals.
“Devices offer much faster time to market than pharmaceuticals,” said Mir Imran, chief executive of InCube Laboratories and a major backer of the gastric pacemaker. “Today’s new devices will be helping patients when today’s new chemicals are still many years from government approval.”
New Brains
Money reports on progress toward external and internal thought-controlled computer interfaces.
Technology Review reports on Microsoft Research using uses electro-encephalograph (EEG) caps to collect the brain activity of people looking at pictures of faces and other objects. Software can distinguish EEG patterns for facial recognition from other objects with 75% accuracy, much quicker and more accurately than through supercomputing algorithms. By integrating humans some picture-parsing tasks could be improved.
Brain-computer interface conference BCI Meets Robotics: Challenging Issues in Brain-Computer Interaction and Shared Control November, 19-20, 2007, KU Leuven, Belgium. Deadline for abstract submission: September 21, 2007.
NIH requests “Blue Sky” Strategic Planning Input on Neural Interfaces The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) is asking the Neural Interfaces Community to help shape its research agenda for the next fifteen years. The deadline for responding is: August 31, 2007.
CFP (due June 30): Ethics of Neural Prosthetics - U Park, PA USA - Aug 26-28, 2007 Where does therapy end and enhancement begin? Are there enhancements which lie beyond the boundaries of medical care? What are the legal, ethical, economic, and social implications of neural prosthetics? These issues will be explored by leading experts in the fields of neuroscience and ethics. Confirmed speakers include Martha Farah, Hank Greely, Jonathan Moreno, University of Pennsylvania.
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