The Wall Street Journal talks to Hugh Herr, founder of Cambridge-based iWalk, which makes the PowerFoot One, a robotic, prosthetic ankle and foot device. Herr is also director of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics Group.
In the video above, Herr presents his research at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.
Last week, iWalk received $20 million of a $21 million Series B round to fund development of the prosthetic from General Catalyst and New York-based WFD Ventures.
Herr, who MHT first interviewed in 2005, was trapped in a snowstorm while climbing New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in 1982 at age 17. He was rescued, but suffered frostbite, and subsequently had both legs amputated just below the knee. The ordeal led him to take up engineering to develop better prosthetics.
If you’re afraid of contracting H1N1, or you’re a hypochondriac, or you’re just morbidly curious — and you have an iPhone — then get yourself to the App Store ASAP. Children’s Hospital reports it has developed an H1N1-alerting and reporting iPhone app with the MIT Media Lab:
The new application also features an option for users to submit an outbreak report. This will enable individuals in cities and countries around the world to interact with the HealthMap team and participate in the public health surveillance process. Users may take photos – of situations and scenarios of, and/or leading to, disease – with their iPhone and submit them to the HealthMap system for review and eventual posting as an alert on the worldwide map.
The free app, called OutbreaksNearMe, is based on HealthMap, another Children’s project — in conjunction with MIT and Harvard — marking cases of infectious diseases on an interactive map.
Scott Kirsner writes about two spinouts from the MIT Media Lab — Waltham-based Affectiva, which makes an emotion-sensing wristband to help study autism, and an unnamed robotics startup founded by Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Media Lab’s Personal Robotics Group, which developed emotion-imitating robot Nexi.
Much more nascent is Cynthia Breazeal’s new company. I’ve been told that it’s going to develop some remotely-operated robotic toys, but Breazeal will only say via e-mail that she’s “doing something innovative in the transmedia space.” It’s not yet incorporated, and she hasn’t yet started pitching investors (though one VC I spoke to last week had already heard about it through the grapevine.) “We’re still working through the concept,” she writes, adding that the company doesn’t yet have a name.
The Melrose Free Press reports Nexi, the MIT Media Lab’s emotion-displaying robot, visited the Milano Senior Center earlier this week. Media lab researchers tagged along to do research on how the robot –a white plastic, emotive head perched atop DigitRobotics UBot — interacted with the elderly.
One woman, who declined to give her name but said she’s a regular at the Milano Senior Center, said Nexi is “interesting” and that other seniors were “intrigued, like I am.”
Asked if she thought Nexi could be used as a senior’s assistant, helping out around the house, the woman said it made her think more of technologies such as artificial appendages and the robots that now do much of the work in car factories.
“To me it’s almost like something I never would have anticipated, but now I would take it very much for granted. Why not?” she said.
The tiny labels are just 3 millimeters across — about the size of the @ symbol on a typical computer keyboard. Yet they can contain far more information than an ordinary barcode: thousands of bits. Currently they require a lens and a built-in LED light source, but future versions could be made reflective, similar to the holographic images now frequently found on credit cards, which would be much cheaper and more unobtrusive.
“We’re trying to make it nearly invisible, but at the same time easy to read with a standard camera, even a mobile phone camera,” Mohan says.
One of the advantages of the new labels is that unlike today’s barcodes, they can be “read” from a distance — up to a few meters away. In addition, unlike the laser scanners required to read today’s labels, these can be read using any standard digital camera, such as those now built in to about a billion cellphones around the world.
The MIT Media Lab’s Joost Bonsen saysRobonauts, rather than astronauts, will do the heavy lifting as humans make more advances into space.
In the spring, I reported on Cambridge-based Energid, which is developing the software to control the Robonaut, and to simulate robotic moon landings, for NASA. After the jump, watch video of the company’s Robonaut-operating software. (more…)
New Scientist takes a look at technologies that can sense human emotion, including a vest made by Boston-based Innerscope Research and the “Interactive Social-Emotional Toolkit,” developed by researchers at the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing Lab.
The article quotes a researcher who postulates a “nightmare scenario” that sounds like it would be more mildly irritating than nightmarish:
But what if some emotion-triggered reincarnated “Mr Clippy” started popping up everywhere?
“The nightmare scenario is that the Microsoft paperclip starts to be associated with anything from the force with which you’re typing to some sort of physiological measurement,” says Gaver. “Then it pops up on your screen and says: ‘Oh I’m sorry you’re unhappy, would you like me to help you with that?’”
MHT talked to Innerscope in January about their vest, worn by Super Bowl viewers’ to track the bodily reactions induced by commercials for Doritos/Pepsi/Budweiser/whatever.
If you’re afraid of contracting H1N1, or you’re a hypochondriac, or you’re just morbidly curious — and you have an iPhone — then get yourself to the App Store ASAP. Children’s Hospital 
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