Neuromuscular problems, as you might know, are difficult to diagnose as doctors do not possess an analysis tool for quantitatively measuring the performance of the patients. Doctors have to rely on qualitative or subjective info. Well, that may not be the case from now on. Introducing NeuroAssess, the technology developed by the researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

It’s a tablet app which may help doctors to measure quantitatively the neuromuscular performance of, say, aged patients or a sportsperson with a concussion.

All that a patient has to do is use a stylus to trace a moving target around the circle that’s on the tablet’s screen. The rest is done by the app. It measures the slightest deviations from the circle and the data it collects will be analyzed based on age, sex and handedness, and the final result will be a score.

The researchers have already done tests on 150 healthy people aged 21 to 95 and so they have baseline data. So now the researchers can test the app on patients.

Lei Stirling, a Wyss senior staff engineer, says, “One day it might sit next to the thermometer and pressure cuff in the doctor’s office. Just as your blood pressure is recorded during every visit, so could your neuromuscular score be tracked over time to determine progress through recovery and rehabilitation.”

Check out the video to know more.

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Researchers at Harvard are working hard to advance one step closer towards finishing a development project involving a micro air vehicle named the Robobee. The robot, that is smaller than a coin, was already able to lift off using its own power source, but now it has added functionalities to help control its flight.

The researchers have added two control mechanisms beneath its wings, allowing programmers to make the Robobee pitch and roll.

Still, with the improved mechanics, the Robobee is incapable of proper flight, and is currently crashing with each attempt. The developers of the project are now working on a third controller, a yaw actuator that along with the pitch and roll controls will allow the robot to hover, and successfully fly.

It seems Harvard aren’t the only ones looking further into micro-robotic flight, as information from the combined Green Brain project emerges from Universities of Sussex and Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The Green Brain project was founded to build a working replica of a bee’s brain by mimicking the complicated neural sensors and connections that are processed by bees whilst working.

“Because the honey bee brain is smaller and more accessible than any vertebrate brain, we hope to eventually be able to produce an accurate and complete model that we can test within a flying robot,” states Dr James Marshall, part of the Green Brain project, and a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield.

However, even with the two projects underway, it’d be unlikely we would see the projects working together for a long time, as there is still a lot of work to be done from both sides.

If both projects were to be successful, the robots could be applied in many circumstances in the future such as building robotic honey farms by programming the Robobees to perform pollination.

[Source]

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The Meshworm robot is able to move along nearly any surface the same way that a worm does; it scrunches up its body, then it extends it. This crawling motion is referred to as peristalsis and while it may not be very fast, it does allow it to navigate through tough terrain where wheels or legs may not work.

There is a coil that wraps around the soft body and by sending an electric current through this coil, it squeezes the body and thus extends it. When this is released, sections of the body scrunch back up and through this repeated motion, the Meshworm silently moves along. What’s more, the body is made up primarily of soft materials, allowing the Meshworm to survive abuse by way of mallet and even getting stepped on. It’s an autonomous robot to boot.

It’s easy to consider what some of the military applications could be for the phallic-like robot, but the researchers have a broader vision. They’re considering next-generation endoscopes, for example, as well as for implants and prosthetics.

[Source]

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Imagine a world free of animal testing, where instead researchers could use organ-on-a-chip technology for testing new drugs and medicines. The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Havard is taking the existing concepts of organ-on-chip technology and going way beyond, linking up to ten of these systems together in a way that would simulate an entire human body.

These special chips are made using a silicon polymer with microfluidic channels that are etched into them and are then filled with human cells and pumps that actually make the cells provide movements similar to actual organs.

One example of this technology in action is a lung-on-a-chip which has an air sac, a separating membrane, a layer of lung cells and a blood channel that contains red blood cells. From there the chip can be connected to a vacuum pump that can cause the lung-on-a-chip to contract and expand like a real set of lungs. No matter what organ they are replicating, its clear that this technology has major implications that could help create more effective ways to test drugs without worrying about directly testing on humans or animals. The Wyss Institute has even entered a $37 million agreement with DARPA to create a system that uses 10 organ-chips in total to create a human-on-a-chip system that mimics many important functions such as the heart, bone marrow and the kidneys.

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Biomechanics, tissue engineering and materials science have come a long ways in the last decade, as proven by the recent achievement by the would-be Doctor Frankensteins at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology. Using the Medusa Jellyfish as their ‘model’, these genius scientists got to work on taking inanimate silicon and living cardiac muscle cells and transforming them into a strange ‘creature’ that somewhat looks and moves like a real jellyfish.

Why a jellyfish you wonder? The development of this “Medusoid”, as they call it, was a proof of concept for reverse engineering muscular organs and basic lifeforms, and was done as a way to help better advance the science behind tissue engineering and help better understand the inner-workings of muscular pumps. The long and short of why a jellyfish is simply that these marine animals moved and pumped in a similar way to the human heart pump, making them the perfect candidate.

The process of reverse engineering a jellyfish and creating an artificial one was obviously a complex process that required special analytical tools from the law enforcement field, such as biometric and crystallography tools. Based on their efforts they were able to incorporate silicone polymer that fashions the body of the strange artificial jellyfish and were also able to create the pump involved.

The bigger picture isn’t to create a bunch of jellyfish-like monsters, but instead to apply these learned concepts to other artificial organ design efforts. The researchers behind the Medusoid hope to continue to evolve this concept jellyfish and allow it to turn and move in a particular direction, give it simple intelligence capabilities to respond to the environment and more- though these are obviously tasks that are far away from the overall abilities of the Medusoid in its current form. With ambitious projects like this, it is only a matter of time before we can easily create fully functional organs that completely change the course of medical treatment and procedures as we know it.

[ source ]

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Testing new drugs and treatments (for diseases affecting humans) on animal models does not actually work all the time. That’s why we believe that researchers around the world will find the so-called “gut-on-chip” very helpful. Developed by the research team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the microdevice has the structure, physiology, and mechanics of the human intestine. The new product will allow researchers to study more about intestinal disorders and the safety and effectiveness of treatments.

The gut-on-chip is the size of a USB flash drive and features a flexible, porous membrane, which acts as the intestinal barrier. The membrane is attached to the side walls of a central chamber that stretch and recoil, using a vacuum controller, for recreating peristaltic motions. And a single layer of human intestinal epithelial cells grow on the membrane.

Common intestinal microbes will survive on the surface of the device’s intestinal cells and this quality makes it suitable for studying many diseases and the effects of new treatments.

According to Donald Ingber, who led the research team, “Because the models most often available to us today do not recapitulate human disease, we can’t fully understand the mechanisms behind many intestinal disorders, which means that the drugs and therapies we validate in animal models often fail to be effective when tested in humans. Having better, more accurate in vitro disease models, such as the gut-on-a-chip, can therefore significantly accelerate our ability to develop effective new drugs that will help people who suffer from these disorders“.

This is not the first engineered organ model from the Wyss Institute. They are already famous for their lung-on-a-chip, and have received funds for developing a heart-lung micromachine and a spleen-on-a-chip. Head here to know more about gut-on-a-chip.

The post Heard Of System-On-Chip, How About Gut-On-Chip? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Basically, the DragonBot is a robotic stuffed animal with Android as its brain. The smartphone docks into its face and effectively functions as the face, showing various expressions by ways of its virtual eyes and mouth. The Android phone is also what controls its articulated limbs and torso. But that’s just the beginning.

It is very good with language, works with visual cues by way of the front-facing camera, and helps children learn all sorts of things. Kombusto is also connected to the Internet, presumably over WiFi/3G/4G via the smartphone inside. Communicating with the cloud, it can gain the collective experiences of all other DragonBots, allowing them all to learn what each individual bot has learned. And you can remotely control Kombusto by way of an app on your Android tablet.

The DragonBot was developed by researchers from Harvard, Northeastern, and MIT, so you know it’s kind of a big deal. They’re also saying it’ll cost less than $1,000, though it’s not clear whether or not that includes the smartphone brain.

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