Friday, June 24, 2011

MHT's Emerging Technology Forum looks at Superhero tech

By James M. Connolly

From tabletop collaboration tools to brain control of remote devices and a powerful exoskeleton, innovators provided a glimpse into the future today during Mass High Tech’s Emerging Technology Forum at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge.

Representing five innovating organizations, the speakers offered their views on the business opportunities for the types of technologies that the developers of comic book superheroes exhibited. They not only showed what their technologies can do in the real world today but explored some of the potential applications down the road.

Aligning the work of Raytheon Co.’s Sarcos team on its XOS exoskeleton with Iron Man’s suit, the company’s Fraser Smith said that the technology allows a user to lift and carry heavy loads. Initially targeted at easing the burden of soldiers who have to carry packs weighing up to 150 pounds, Smith said the XOS technology was funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant. He said that beyond military applications, an exoskeleton has potential in industrial applications, particularly in a sector such as shipbuilding where workers have to safely handle heavy steel plates in tight quarters. However, he also noted that the core technology has potential to help the aging populations with weight-bearing tasks, or to restore functionality to people with disabilities.

Pervasis Therapeutics Inc. CEO Frederic Chereau showed how cell technology in Pervasis’ Vascugel product can repair damage to blood vessels in patients such as those on hemodialysis. However, Chereau looked further ahead when talking about innovation, saying that the first generation of regenerative technologies will spawn a flow of many more products throughout the medical sector. Chereau said, “The more we learn about human biology, the more we will be able to use it. We are using what is happening at a very low level and amplifying it.”

In talking about innovation, Chereau noted how he looks at what is occuring in other labs, such as what Raytheon is working on, and thinks about completely new applications outside of the original intended use.

Touching on both the robotics sector and medicine, Sydney Cash, head of the Cortical Physiology Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and clinical co-investigator with Braingate, showed how monitoring brain activity can lead to technology that enables people with severe disabilities to control a robotic arm or a motorized wheelchair. Emphasizing that the work is still at the experimental stage, Cash showed how collaborators in Braingate have monitored the activity in the motor cortex when the patient responds to a command to move something. Braingate is focused on translating that brain activity into instructions that the controlled device can understand. “Our focus has been on restoring function to those who have lost it for any number of reasons,” said Cash, who noted that the likely first application of the technology is in better enabling people who cannot speak to work with a computer keyboard to communicate with others.

In the education sector, Louisa Rosenheck, research manager at MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program, demonstrated how augmented reality can be used in smartphone applications to provide information to people that is tied to their physical location. For example, applications might recognize a student’s location and have an animated character pop up to provide expanded information about that location, such as a landmark.

Wellesley College professor of computer science Orit Shaer bridged the education, computer and life sciences sectors, describing new human-computer interfaces. In her work, tabletop displays are used as collaborative tools in applications such as comparing genomic data. She showed how multiple users could be working with a tabletop interface, simultaneously comparing genes and calling up additional reference data. She showed how the next step could be to allow researchers to use such an interface not only to design new DNA but to work with an attached robotic device to build that DNA.