How many wheelchairs have you seen that can climb stairs? Likely not many. The major advances –let’s call them big strides– in assistive technology (like Disney’s prosthetic arms and this exoskeleton) get a lot of press, but the truth is that many of these devices have yet to see widespread use among the estimated 15% of the world’s population that’s physically impaired. A new event styled after the Olympics called the Cybathlon aims to change that, bringing together some of the world’s best scientists and disabled pilots.
It’s essentially a bionic version of the Olympics. That’s a pretty awesome concept, but don’t expect gymnastics or shot-put events. Robert Riener, Head of the Health Sciences and Technology Department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH), founded the Cybathlon as a way of putting novel devices to the test in real-life situations. To that end, the focus is on regular activities instead of sports. Pilots will perform a series of common daily tasks using various cutting-edge assistive technologies.
Organized by ETH, the races will challenge scientists to come up with better assistive tech, with awards for both the pilot and the device maker for each event. Both commercially available devices and lab prototypes will compete, while pre-determined rules for the race tracks and obstacle courses will allow for comparison between within each category of devices.
For example, the brain computer interface (BCI) race is designed to test the precision and reliability of BCIs in a virtual game. Pilots will use BCIs to control characters in a game developed specially for a given purpose.
The Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike Race, on the other hand, is designed to test the accuracy of intelligent control devices used to move paralyzed muscles. This event will focus on spinal cord injuries, using non-motorized bikes in two-pilot races where the pilots control the muscle stimulation themselves.
There’s also the Powered Arm and Leg Prosthesis Races, which will focus on a series of six common tasks (like opening a can or climbing stairs) that take the weight, flexibility, and fine motor control of each device into account.
Finally, the Powered Exoskeleton and Powered Wheelchair Races center on ease of use and maneuverability. Only pilots with spinal cord injuries will participate in the exoskeleton event, while the wheelchair event is open to any pilot with severe injuries that prevent walking.
In addition to the races, the audience can check out an interactive exhibition of the devices and the Cybalthon Scientific Symposium two days prior to the event, also hosted by ETH. The keynote speakers include Doctors Hugh Herr from MIT, and Michael Goldfarb from Vanderbilt. The deadline for symposium participant abstracts is April 30. The inaugural Cybathlon will be held in the Swiss Arena in Kloten, Zurich, Switzerland, on October 8, 2016.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.