OT: Hardware-to-Organism Interfaces (h2oi)

[Puke]

I remember a few years back, Russian inteligence declasified documents on a cyber cat they had built, for survailance. they could steer through implants in the poor thing, record video and audio (god knows where they put the sensors) and it had an antenna burried under its skin. poor thing cost MILLIONS.

honest to god, i read this in the news - and you can probably dredge it up on the web. according to the report the day they were going to field test it, they let it out of their van and watched in horror as it was run over by a car.

in unrelated news, there is also some fierce competition between companies developing ocular implants to restore sight to the blind. some of them tap directly into the occular nerve, and the one that has gotten the most press coverage is able to deliver a 100 pixel (10x10 field of dots) display, enough to enable the subject to destinguish shapes, or read very large block lettering.

Artificial Muscle is a big thing, not only for medicine but for robotics and small motors. nanotubes are all the rage right now, but I saw one interesting report a few months back, about using very fine and very poreous strands of platinum that can contract by huge ammounts, because of all the holes and pores.

[Puke]

wow, i was WAY off. first, it was ours and not theres. second, we couldnt steer it - which was part of the problem. third, no video, just audio.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/an...00/1638924.stm

They say your memory is the second thing to go. Heck if I can remember what the first thing was, but I guess its not as necessary as I must have thought, back when I had it.

[Kamog]

What a terrible thing to do to a cat...

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by dmm:
Thanks for the feedback so far. For the record, "mind-reading" interfaces are total fantasy (at least at this point). I'm looking for ideas that might reasonably be implemented in 10 years or so.

Ummm, no, not total fantasy. Well, maybe "mind reading" as in, hook someone up and see what they are thinking, like in that Natalie Wood movie. But they already have had some success with interfacing the mind with simple machines and getting them to respond to direct mental impulses. Don't know if we are talking practical applications in less then ten years, but it seems entirely possible given the progress they have already made. Did you read the article I linked to? Here it is in case you missed it in my first post. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/medicin...576464,00.html

[ February 06, 2004, 12:25: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by Puke:
in unrelated news, there is also some fierce competition between companies developing ocular implants to restore sight to the blind. some of them tap directly into the occular nerve, and the one that has gotten the most press coverage is able to deliver a 100 pixel (10x10 field of dots) display, enough to enable the subject to destinguish shapes, or read very large block lettering.

Drat, foiled again!

I thought about making artificial eyes for the blind. Those would need to be wired to intact ocular nerves, and in theory at least should be possible. I had considered making a higher density of photoreceptors to give the recipient eagle-vision (since the smallest CCD cells can now be made the size of a human cone cell,) but realized that human brains probably weren't even "wired" for any more cones and rods than were already in place. So an additional circuit to handle the additional information from the photoreceptors might be needed before interfacing with the brain. I say might because the hypothesized "vision area" of the human brain is huge. It might be capable of more than I think. What such a pre-brain vision circuit could do for example would be to filter and focus a part of the picture and in effect allow the recipient to zoom in and out on a part of the image that his or her brain is able to handle at once (I would think this could be wired to the nerves that now control the lenses in functioning human eyes, with actual focusing done automatically in the prosthetic eye.) The circuit could also quite easily be made to record the full video information in such a way that it could be read out into a computer or video system. Spy of the future?

[Nocturnal]

But Henriquez and other neuroengineers do see one particularly enormous roadblock in the way of DARPA's goal. According to Rudolph, it would be unethical to implant electrodes in the heads of healthy soldiers.

HA! HA! HA! HA! HA HA! Since when has ethics ever been a roadblock to military technology? It would be no problem to find a hundred fighter pilots and commandos who'd volunteer to have their brains drilled into.

[JurijD]

MY THOUGHTS ON THIS SUBJECT:

1. Hmm in my experiance the biggest problem in getting any cyber-implant to work for a long time is the human immune system. Even the simplest artificial heart valve causes MAJOR problems because its pLastic negatively charged surface triggers the complement system and activates Neutrofiles and a whole bunch of other immune cells to attack it. These people have to eat huge ammounts of immuno-suppressors just to prevent their own body killing itself.

2. The neural-machine interface is not as easy as it is portrayed in some popular pseudo scientifical articles. Controlling a cats muscles with electrical impulses and trying to hook up a nerve and an electrical wire are two very different things. Our nerves don´t conduct electrical currents in a manner even remotely simmilar to an electrical conductor. Triggering a nerve impuls by hitting a nerve with an electrical charge is one thing... but being able to induce controlled impulses in a nerve and/or read the output of a nerve is very difficult and for the most part impossible for now.

3. Apart from that just trying to for example reconnect say your Nervus Radialis (a nerve that controls some muscles in the hand) after a 1cm gap in it occured after an injury is not even remotelly possible because of the simple fact that a nerve is composed of millions upon millions if neural axons that twist and spiral inside of it and trying to get the right ends to meet for the greater part of these is science fiction for now. Not to mention that even if you could figure out which axon connects where we just don´t have the nano technology to reconnect them in a manner that would be preceise enough.

4. Any kind of limb re-attachment sugery is very difficult and almost always leads to rejection by the host. And even if it does not the host never gets any kind of good motor control back in that limb (even if it is his/her own limb that is being reattached). Some struggle for years to even get a reattached hand just to close under their own will.

5. Although the prospect of attaching electrodes to the visual cortex in the brain and having them input impulses into it for vision might seem simple it is far from that. You see our brain doesn´t process images like a computer. We have several regions that perform different "calculations" like: shape, color, movement, seeing edges etc. And we are a loooooooong way from being able to input the right impulses into the right areas of our brain to restore vision. The people that got these implants for the most part weren´t able to see anything. SOME saw vague flashes of light... naturally as someone was sending electrical impulses into their visual cortex But for them to be able to really SEE and COMPREHEND color, movement, shapes etc. hehe, well that is PURE science fiction for now and will remain that for a long time.

6. Recently advances were made and as far as I know the US airforce was trying to figure out a way for their pilots to control aircraft by thought only. Perhpas you saw these experiments: a guy sits in front of a computer with a whole bunch of wires comming out of his head and then he "thinks" about the mouse moving in RIGHT and the mouse moves right.... These results are based on our brain generating area-specific electrical charges when we are thinging of the thing over and over again. And using this technique they were never able to get any fine control... if the subject trained for months he was able for example to move the mouse up, down, left and right; nothing more.

In conclusion:
Scifi makes it look easy but hehe, its really very difficut and we won´t be able to produce any meaningful H2Oi-s any time soon... say in the next 2 or 3 decades. For us to be able to do useful H2Oi we need:
- vastly superior computers... think 100-1000x faster than today
- improved knowledge of the human immune system
- a huge leap in neurology & neurochemistry
- at lest basic nano-robots to complete the fine machine-organism connections for us

I´d sure like to get to know the borg queen I´m sure she´d have some interesting info to get us started in the right direction

[ February 06, 2004, 13:28: Message edited by: JurijD ]