Walk, swim, cycle?
Are we talking about pre-recorded neural commands, "modes" in implant?
Or they actually managed to restore connectivity in nerves, bypassing damaged part?
Quote from article: "Dr Courtine and Dr Bloch have developed a wafer-thin device with electrodes that could target the dormant nerves. Once implanted into Mr Roccati’s back, the device sent in pulses of electricity that mimicked those normally present in the nerves of an uninjured person as they walk.
By doing this, the device acted like an amplifier for any electrical signals coming from Mr Roccati’s brain. Those brain signals would normally be blocked by his damaged spinal tissue and be incapable of activating the nerves in his lower back. But with the stimulation device in place, Mr Roccati was able to voluntarily control those once-dormant nerves, allowing him to move his legs and walk."
It's his brain, the device is only used as amplifier. The fact that article talks about "Walk, swim, cycle" in its title is only a part of what people fitted with devices can do. It said he can also sit and talk to friends at bar.
Read the Nature article linked at one of top comments. It is also mentioned in every interview the researchers gave recently. The muscles are controlled with the software only, the brain doesn't participate at all.
"... the first implant specifically designed to control movement by mimicking the signals the lower body usually receives from the brain and upper spinal cord."
The methods used in this study sound almost exactly like a TENS unit (1). As someone with a spinal cord injury that almost left me a quadriplegic, and who has serious neuropathy as a result, I have found that TENS units do very little to help me. I hope this can help people though,
Yes, it is inaccurate to the point of being the reverse.
Muscles are controlled through the software, with pattern of activation uploaded from an iPad via Bluetooth and generally managed by am accompanying person. The patients absolutely do NOT control the muscles with their brain.
They hooked up trodes to the bottom section of the nerves, enabling patients to activate, selectively, respective muscles. Chain those activations together in sequence and you got a walk.
Also I heard authors give an interview on the radio and they mention that while walking is impressive, a more practical outcome is an ability to control muscles on the back, because these allow for bending and controlling the balance while sitting on a chair.
As the partner of a complete paraplegic, sitting up and providing trunk control would be a huge benefit to newly injured patients. My partner had titanium rods but in their back 20+ years ago and the connections and bones are now wearing down. Allowing the muscles to provide trunk control would likely improve quality of life, increase mobility, and remove the challenges with arthritis from implants they put in spinal cord injury patients currently.
Reading in detail what it actually entails to be completely paraplegic is quite an eye-opening experience.
I think a lot of people don't really see past the wheelchair, I certainly didn't for a long time. Some people try as an educational experience to live for a day in a wheelchair, but that's easy, spending a whole day sitting down is something desk workers do anyway. It's a completely different thing if you don't get to use any core muscles. I wanted to try that, but couldn't go even ten seconds without cheating. Even with all kinds of assistive technology it's extremely hard. Also the lack of bowel control must be a total nightmare.
The whole "paraplegics can do anything, they're just like you and me" schtick that normal people are fed is a nice coping mechanism, but I think it may be holding back funding for research into real solutions.
Probably pre-recorded, according to the nature article:
> Once the implant was in place, each person could control the pattern of electrical stimulation, using buttons and a tablet to raise or lower each leg, for example [...] using the device to guide their muscles through preprogrammed movements.
Wait, are such devices even legal? Looks like walking spy-cam to me. I want to know if someone records video/takes picture of me. With this glasses you can`t tell if you are being filmed.
Yes, there is a "right to panorama" in most countries. However this dataset has been recorded with the _express permission_ of all the people involved. Which is different to the imagenet, where they just crawled a whole bunch of images and called it a day.
Second, you need to take the "Argh its facebook, boo hiss" hat off. Then apply some critical thinking. an AR world that is connected to the physical _requires_ this kind of thing. Your device need to anticipate what you are going to do so that it can work out the probability of your need and act on it. Like Jeeves, but less able, and more annoying. As its ML, it need a massive dataset to train on. this is <0.5% of that dataset.
Depending on how things are done, if facebook are first to market with a usable AR system, they will be forced to have anonymisation built in (as in remove faces at the sensor level, unless you have permission to remember). Apple will have a showy "pixelation" layer, that is mostly ineffectual, but will PR it out to make them seem like they've cured cancer. Google, if they ever manage to get back into AR will just make things cheap and let the shitty android marketplace spy on what ever they like.
You will also have to remember that the power budget of these glasses is absolutely fucking tiny. All day screen, SLAM, AI and possibly music will need to all fit in to ~2-5watt hours. This means that virtually everything will need to be on device. (dropping to the cloud eats a boat load of power.)
Now that's not to say that 100% accurate [if thats even possible] "diarisation" won't rip society apart.
There are lots of questions that need to be answered, the problem is, tech journalists are ill equipped to ask them. Most of the teams designing the glasses are well meaning, but their targets and life experience has not equipped them to do a good job at ethics.
Is it illegal to shoot videos in public place without permission of all present ? Private places may have their own rules. Also this is R&D, long way before such questions matter.
It seems to me, that this thing combines disadvantages both from car and a bicycle.
Also: only one wheel on the front? Imagine what will happen if you decide to apply brakes while cornering at a reasonable speed.
