What If Bionics Were Better
From: Wired News - 09/25/2006
By: Chris Oakes

A small but growing number of early adopters have started to undergo bionics
procedures out of choice, rather than necessity. While many still consider
radical transformations to the human body taboo, the convergence of man and
machine is fast becoming a reality. To some, such as freelance illustrator
Phillipa Garner, who has already undergone a sex reassignment operation,
bionics surgery is simply a logical step on the path to self improvement. "I
would be inclined to go through some pretty radical conceptual
self-improvement procedures," she said. Still, prosthetic surgeries such as
Victhom's Neurostep are experimental and often inconvenient. "If you try to
replace something on the human body, you have to do it in the way that the
individual will feel exactly that they have the full control of the
mechanism," said Victhom founder and COO Stephane Bedard. Last November,
European researchers unveiled the Cyberhand, a prototype of a device that
enables amputees to touch, feel, and manipulate the hand in accordance with
the wearer's neural signals. When developing procedures that imbue the human
body with technology, researchers carefully must guard against the
possibility of a machine taking over, according to Henrik Christensen, a
professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71840-0.html?tw=wn_technology_3

Links:
Cyberhand
http://www.cyberhand.org.nyud.net:8090/

Henrik I. Christensen
http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~hic/

Victhom
http://www.victhom.com/index_en.htm