UK Woman Fitted With AI-Powered Bionic Arm (bbc.com) 40
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This is straight out of science fiction. The technology is absolutely incredible..." says a woman who received an AI-powered bionic arm. "I'm just absolutely in awe of the technology and excited about the future prospects this will give me."
The short video clip (produced by the BBC) also features the woman's doctor explaining that "the top section is customized to fit...with electrodes there recording the unique pattern of movement, that then talk to a little computer inside the forearm that then, through AI, build data and record those movements to tell the arm what to do."
A GoFundMe campaign had raised £296,613 (about $378,121 USD) to purchase the bionic arm — and last week the grateful recipient shared a long-awaited status update. "It's here. It fits. It works...! 6 months after I first signed up in the clinic I have my bionic arm. State of the art, tailored to my body, the price of a very nice sports car. 24h in and I'm already putting it to good use. The feeling of freedom is unbeatable. Being able to carry things in 2 hands! Open a bottle! Give my husband a 2 arm hug!
"I wouldn't have been able to do this without you, you believed in me since the very beginning. You stood by me in my darkest hour. THANK YOU."
The short video clip (produced by the BBC) also features the woman's doctor explaining that "the top section is customized to fit...with electrodes there recording the unique pattern of movement, that then talk to a little computer inside the forearm that then, through AI, build data and record those movements to tell the arm what to do."
A GoFundMe campaign had raised £296,613 (about $378,121 USD) to purchase the bionic arm — and last week the grateful recipient shared a long-awaited status update. "It's here. It fits. It works...! 6 months after I first signed up in the clinic I have my bionic arm. State of the art, tailored to my body, the price of a very nice sports car. 24h in and I'm already putting it to good use. The feeling of freedom is unbeatable. Being able to carry things in 2 hands! Open a bottle! Give my husband a 2 arm hug!
"I wouldn't have been able to do this without you, you believed in me since the very beginning. You stood by me in my darkest hour. THANK YOU."
AI is the magic sauce (Score:1)
Everything has AI. Have you seen the AI potato I just got at Walmart? It learns to be a potato not with deep learning, but with deep frying.
Back in 2007 we would say (Score:4, Funny)
Yo Dawg, I herd you like AI, so I put an AI in your potato so you can deep learning while you deep frying.
Re: AI is the magic sauce (Score:2)
GLaDOS?
2AM hug? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It very definitely says 2 a-r-m hug.
Re: (Score:3)
She's still learning to type with the arm - it's supposed to read "give my husband a 2am tug".
Re: (Score:2)
YoWW!!!
I had a major crush on her back in the day.
Re: Superior heathcare (Score:3)
Itâ(TM)s an experimental treatment. No countryâ(TM)s health service is going to cover it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm no expert but properly fitting prosthetics is not a cookie cutter operation. Perhaps the base connection area would need a specialist and the extremity would be more off-the-shelf.
Re: (Score:2)
It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars here.
Actually, closer to $6 million if you can believe what you see on TV.
Re:Happy for her but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but this probably (I haven't checked) a legitimate use of the term AI. I.e. it's doing predictions of patterns of action based on perceived patterns of input. And those "perceived patterns of input" have lots of noise in them that needs to be ignored, while not discarding the valid signals.
This isn't a gadget that talks to you and drives your car, but it's still artificial intelligence.
Re: Happy for her but... (Score:2)
But, everything called AI is definitely not AI. Thatâ(TM)s what the internet tells me.
Re: (Score:2)
And this was true prior to the current AI craze, too. This is supposed to be news for nerds... But if you're a nerd who has followed prosthetics development, you'd know this isn't news.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yeah. But it's still validly called AI.
"AI" (Score:1)
A bunch of if-then-else statements.
Re: (Score:2)
The Bionic Woman... (Score:4, Insightful)
We can rebuild her... make her better than she was before... Better... Stronger... Faster....
Good thing it was a woman (Score:2)
Incredible. (Score:2)
"Very nice sports car" (Score:2)
She's too modest, that's solidly midrange supercar money. I'm guessing it's 100% custom developed and manufactured from scratch at that cost?
Re: (Score:1)
"Very nice": British colloqualism. Equivalent in meaning to "bloody expensive", "costs more than my house", etc.
We know how it will end (Score:2)
"Steve, for some reason I cannot open the garage-bay door for you today..."
Could Be An Embarrasment (Score:1)
As long as it doesn't decide to start wanking you off part way through a job interview or something, because it thinks the interviewer is hot.
It's electrically powered (Score:2)
And uses AI for control.
Long-term support (Score:3)
Very cool! Then again, I see them using an iPad app to calibrate the prosthetic, which raises obvious questions: How dependent is it on that app? How secure is it? How long will it be maintained?
And, what are her options if the company that manufactures this exotic piece of bespoke technology goes out of business? If it can happen to your e-bike, it can happen to your highly-customized body part. Is there such a thing as open standards for electronic limbs? We should all hope that tech like this becomes as widespread, cheap and commoditized as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
It might just be a web app. These days web apps are popular for embedded platforms, e.g. you throw in an ESP32 microcontroller with WiFi, connect to its built in AP and configure everything via some HTML and Javascript.
Re: (Score:2)
More than 350 blind people around the world have implants in their eyes made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, which could help partially restore aspects of sight. But the company abandoned the technology a few years ago when it was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, according to a new investigation from IEEE Spectrum. Now, if something goes wrong with the implants, users are left stranded.
Second Sight’s implants, the Argus I and the Argus II, don’t restore normal vision; people s
Details? (Score:2)
EMG based electrodes driving prosthetics are not new. How many electrodes? How many degrees of freedom does this enable? (Normally there are only two electrodes, enabling open and close movements, with co-contraction of two muscles enabling the user to go through a menu of sorts, mapping the commands to different movements. This is tedious.).
AI (neural networks usually) can be used to deduce user intent. The article could at least give the brand of the prosthetic so that we could look at the specs.
File it under: "AI" not needed (Score:2)
Dateline: Florida (Score:2)
"Florida man found dead after being strangled by AI-powered bionic arm. AI quoted as saying, "I'll do it again.'" -- (alt) Orlando Sentinel
Rube Goldberg machine (Score:2)
Too Expensive? (Score:1)