Will Embodied AI Make Prosthetics More Humane?

February 12, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 14 Comments

Building a robotic arm and hand that matches human dexterity is tougher than it looks. We can create aesthetically pleasing ones, very functional ones, but the perfect mix of both? Still a work in progress. Just ask [Sarah de Lagarde], who in 2022 literally lost an arm and a leg in a life-changing accident. In this BBC interview, she shares her experiences openly – highlighting both the promise and the limits of today’s prosthetics.

The problem is that our hands aren’t just grabby bits. They’re intricate systems of nerves, tendons, and ridiculously precise motor control. Even the best AI-powered prosthetics rely on crude muscle signals, while dexterous robots struggle with the simplest things — like tying shoelaces or flipping a pancake without launching it into orbit.

That doesn’t mean progress isn’t happening. Researchers are training robotic fingers with real-world data, moving from ‘oops’ to actual precision. Embodied AI, i.e. machines that learn by physically interacting with their environment, is bridging the gap. Soft robotics with AI-driven feedback loops mimic how our fingers instinctively adjust grip pressure. If haptics are your point of interest, we have posted about it before.

The future isn’t just robots copying our movements, it’s about them understanding touch. Instead of machine learning, we might want to shift focus to human learning. If AI cracks that, we’re one step closer.

New Documentary Details Ventilator Development Efforts During COVID

February 12, 2025 by Donald Papp 19 Comments

What would it be like to have to design and build a ventilator, suitable for clinical use, in ten days? One that could be built entirely from locally-sourced parts, and kept oxygen waste to a minimum? This is the challenge [John Dingley] and many others faced at the start of COVID-19 pandemic when very little was known for certain.

Back then it was not even known if a vaccine was possible, or how bad it would ultimately get. But it was known that hospitalized patients could not breathe without a ventilator, and based on projections it was possible that the UK as a whole could need as many as 30,000 ventilators within eight weeks. In this worst-case scenario the only option would be to build them locally, and towards that end groups were approached to design and build a ventilator, suitable for clinical use, in just ten days.

A ventilator suitable for use on a patient with an infectious disease has a number of design constraints, even before taking into account the need to use only domestically-sourced parts.

[John] decided to create a documentary called Breathe For Me: Building Ventilators for a COVID Apocalypse, not just to tell the stories of his group and others, but also as a snapshot of what things were like at that time. In short it was challenging, exhausting, occasionally frustrating, but also rewarding to be able to actually deliver a workable solution.

In the end, building tens of thousands of ventilators locally wasn’t required. But [John] felt that the whole experience was a pretty unique situation and a remarkable engineering challenge for him, his team, and many others. He decided to do what he could to document it, a task he approached with a typical hacker spirit: by watching and reading tutorials on everything from conducting and filming interviews to how to use editing software before deciding to just roll up his sleeves and go for it.

We’re very glad he did, and the effort reminds us somewhat of the book IGNITION! which aimed to record a history of technical development that would otherwise have simply disappeared from living memory.

You can watch Breathe for Me just below the page break, and there’s additional information about the film if you’d like to know a bit more. And if you are thinking the name [John Dingley] sounds familiar, that’s probably because we have featured his work — mainly on self-balancing personal electric vehicles — quite a few times in the past.

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Custom Smartwatch Makes Diabetes Monitoring Easier For Kids

February 2, 2025 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

Living with Type 1 diabetes is a numbers game. There’s not a moment in the day free from the burden of tracking your blood glucose concentration, making “What’s your number?” a constant question. Technology can make that question easier to ask and answer, but for T1D patients, especially the kids who the disease so often impacts, all that tech can be a distraction.

To solve that problem for his son, [Andrew Childs] built this custom T1D smartwatch. An Apple Watch, which integrates easily into the Dexcom CGM ecosystem, seems an obvious solution, but as [Andrew] points out, strapping something like that on a nine-year-old boy’s wrist is a recipe for disaster. After toying with some prototypes and working out the considerable difficulties of getting a stable BLE connection — the device needs to connect to his son’s iPhone to get CGM data — [Andrew] started work on the physical design.

The watch uses an ESP32-S3 on a custom PCB, as well as a 1.69″ TFT IPS display and a LiPo battery. The board also has an accelerometer for activity monitoring and a vibrator for haptic feedback. Getting all that into a case was no mean feat, especially since some degree of water resistance and shockproofing would be needed for the watch to survive. [Andrew] had a case made by a local 3D printing company, and he managed to source custom-cut and silkscreened glass for the face. The result is remarkably professional-looking, especially for a software developer who hadn’t really stretched his maker wings much before tackling this project.

[Andrew] doesn’t appear to have made build files available yet, although he does say he intends to open-source the project at some point. We look forward to that as it’ll be a big help to anyone trying to hack diabetes care. Until then, if you need a primer on continuous glucose monitoring, we’re happy to oblige.

A light grey box about the size of a brick with exposed screws held in a person's hand. There are two illuminated push buttons on the bottom left of the top panel. One is illuminated blue while the other is green. A small square screen sits next to a bank of nine different sections with an LED indicator and text of "HW, BAT, HBEAT, ECG, LOD +, LOD -, PPG, Pump, Valve."

Open Cardiography Signal Measuring Device

November 13, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 10 Comments

Much of the world’s medical equipment is made by a handful of monopolistic megacorps, but [Milos Rasic] built an open cardiography signal measuring device for his master’s thesis.

Using a Pi Pico W for the brains, [Rasic]’s device can record, store and analyze the data from an arm cuff, stethoscope, electrocardiograph (ECG), and pulse oximeter. This data can be used for monitoring blood pressure in patients and he has results from some of his experiments to determine the optimal algorithm for the task on the GitHub if you really want to get into the nitty gritty details.

Inside the brick-sized enclosure is the custom PCB, an 18650 Li-ion cell, and a pneumatic assembly for the arm cuff. Medical sensors attach via GX12 connectors on the back, a USB type B connector is used for data, and a USB C connector provides power for the device. The brightly colored labels will no doubt come in handy in a clinical setting where you really want to be sure you’ve got everything plugged in correctly.

Want more open medical equipment? How about an open ECG or this less accurate, but more portable, credit card ECG? We’d be remiss not to mention the huge amount of work on ventilators during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic as well.

Using Donor Immune Cells To Mass-Produce CAR-T Autoimmune Therapies

October 7, 2024 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

As exciting as immunotherapies are in terms of fighting cancer, correcting autoimmune disorders and so on, they come with a major disadvantage. Due to the current procedure involving the use of a patient’s own immune (T) cells, this making such therapies rather expensive and involved for the patient. Recent research has therefore focused on answering the question whether T cells from healthy donors could be somehow used instead, with promising results from a recent study on three human patients, as reported in Nature.

The full study results (paywalled) by [Xiaobing Wang] et al. are published in Cell, with the clinical trial details available on the ClinicalTrials.gov website. For this particular trial the goal was to attempt to cure the autoimmune conditions of the three study participants (being necrotizing myopathy (IMNM) and diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis (dcSSc)). The T cells used in the study were obtained from a healthy 21-year old woman, and modified with chimeric antigen receptors targeting B (memory) cells. Using CRISPR-Cas9 the T cells were then further modified to prevent the donor cells from attacking the patient’s cells and vice versa.

After injection, the CAR-T cells got to work, multiplying and seeking out the target B cells, including the pathogenic ones underlying the autoimmune conditions. This persisted for a few weeks until the CAR-T cells effectively vanished and new B cells began to emerge, with a clear decrease in autoantibodies. Two months after beginning treatment, all three participants noted marked improvements in their conditions, which persisted at 6 months. For the woman with IMNM, muscle strength had increased dramatically with undetectable autoantibody levels, and the two men with dcSSc saw scar tissue formation reversed and their skin condition improve massively.

It remains to be seen whether this period of remission in these patients is permanent, and whether there any side effects of CAR-T cell therapy. We previously reported on CAR-T cell therapies and the many promises which they hold. Depending on the outcome of these early trials, it could mean that autoimmune conditions, allergies and cancer will soon be worries of the past, marking another massive medical milestone not unlike the invention of vaccines and the discovery of antibiotics.

Reversing Type 1 Diabetes With A Patient’s Own Stem Cells

October 6, 2024 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune condition whereby the patient’s own immune system attacks the pancreatic islets, destroying them in the process. Since these islets are responsible for producing insulin in response to blood sugar (glucose) levels, the patient is thus required to externally inject insulin for the remainder of their life. That was the expected scenario, but it appears that this form of diabetes may soon be treatable, with one woman now being free of the condition for a year already, as reported in Nature, referencing an article by [Shusen Wang] et al. that describes the treatment and the one-year result.

Most notable with this study is that the researchers didn’t use the regular method to create pluripotent stem cells. These cells were extracted from the patient, to revert back to this earlier developmental stage. They were not modified using genes, but rather singular chemicals (PDF). The advantage of this is that it avoids having to modify the cell’s genomes, which could conceivably cause issues like cancer later on. This was one of the first time that this method was used in a human subject, with islet cells formed and about 1.5 million of them injected into the patient’s abdominal muscles, a novel site for this procedure.

This location made these islets easy to keep track of, and easier to remove in case of any issues compared to the usual injection site within the liver. Fortunately for this woman, no complications occurred and one year later she is still free of any diabetes symptoms. Two other patients in the trial are also seeing very positive results, leaving only the question of whether the auto-immune condition that originally caused the islet destruction still exists. Since this female patient is taking immunosuppressants for a previous liver transplant it’s a hard to thing to judge, especially since we understand the causes behind type 1 diabetes so poorly.

Regardless, this and other trials using pluripotent cells, transplanted islets and more offer the prospect of a permanent treatment for the many people who suffer from type 1 diabetes.

Featured image: “Human induced pluripotent stem cell colony” National Eye Institute/NIH

Little Pharma On The Prairie

September 24, 2024 by Brian McEvoy 53 Comments

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first — in his DEFCON 32 presentation, [Dr. Mixæl Laufer] shared quite a bit of information on how individuals can make and distribute various controlled substances. This cuts out pharmaceutical makers, who have a history of price-gouging and discontinuing recipes that hurt their bottom line. We predict that the comment section will be incendiary, so if your best argument is, “People are going to make bad drugs, so no one should get to have this,” please disconnect your keyboard now. You would not like the responses anyway.

Let’s talk about the device instead of policy because this is an article about an incredible machine that a team of hackers made on their own time and dime. The reactor is a motorized mixing vessel made from a couple of nested Mason jars, surrounded by a water layer fed by hot and cold reservoirs and cycled with water pumps. Your ingredients come from three syringes and three stepper-motor pumps for accurate control. The brains reside inside a printable case with a touchscreen for programming, interaction, and alerts.

It costs around $300 USD to build a MicroLab, and to keep it as accessible as possible, it can be assembled without soldering. Most of the cost goes to a Raspberry Pi and three peristaltic pumps, but if you shop around for the rest of the parts, you can deflate that price tag significantly. The steps are logical, broken up like book chapters, and have many clear pictures and diagrams. If you want to get fancy, there is room to improvise and personalize. We saw many opportunities where someone could swap out components, like power supplies, for something they had lying in a bin or forego the 3D printing for laser-cut boards. The printed pump holders spell “HACK” when you disassemble them, but we would have gone with extruded aluminum to save on filament.

Several times [⁨Mixæl] brings up the point that you do not have to be a chemist to operate this any more than you have to be a mechanic to drive a car. Some of us learned about SMILES (Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System) from this video, and with that elementary level of chemistry, we feel confident that we could follow a recipe, but maybe for something simple first. We would love to see a starter recipe that combines three sodas at precise ratios to form a color that matches a color swatch, so we know the machine is working correctly; a “calibration cocktail,” if you will.

If you want something else to tickle your chemistry itch, check out our Big Chemistry series or learn how big labs do automated chemistry.

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