Sight Savers
From: Scientific American - 12/2006 - page 58
By: Charles Q. Choi

This invention affords hope that some blind people may be able to view images
and video. Visually challenged artist and poet Elizabeth Goldring, a senior
fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, developed just such a
"seeing machine". It projects images directly onto the retina using
light-emitting diodes, similar to much more costly scanning laser
ophthalmoscopes used by medical institutions. In a pilot clinical trial of
the seeing machin with 10 volunteers, most of whom were legally blind because
of retinopathy and othe causes, six correctly interpreted all 10 examples
from a specially crafted visual language that combines words and pictures. 

Links:
Elizabeth Goldring
http://web.mit.edu/vlb/www/people.html
http://mit.edu/veb/elizabeth.html

The Seeing Machine
http://mit.edu/veb/machine.html

Visual Language for the Blind
http://mit.edu/veb/visual.html



Prosthetics may in the future enable an amputee to use electrical signals
from remaining muscles so that he or she can move an artificia; arm more
naturally. Protagoras Cutchis of Johns Hopkins University developed an
electrode array implanted around the sheath of a peripheral nerve that does
not penetrate into the nerve itself, unlike previous technologies. The
electrode can process signals from electrical impulses from the brain that
might eventually direct an arm to perform up to 22 distinct motions, far
superior to previous prostheses that could move in only three directions.
Machines are thus proviing ever more able to take up the slack when the human
body falters. 

Links:
Electrode Array for Determination of Specific Axonal Firing within a
   Peripheral Nerve
http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2006/060524d.asp

Protagoras Cutchis
http://www.graduatingengineer.com/careerprofiles/system-eng2.html