Hand Jive: High-Tech Glove Turns Gestures into Music

If you find yourself tapping your hand to a beat while sitting at your desk, in the car or on a park bench, a high-tech glove might be just the gadget to help you turn the tunes in your head into music you can record.

The glove, called the Remidi T8 wearable instrument, is loaded with pressure-sensitive sensors along the fingertips and palm. Its wristband controls how the combination of sounds from each sensor are translated as a user moves his or her hand, according to a post on Kickstarter announcing a project to produce the glove, which is not yet available.
The glove aims to be a very intuitive device for music artists, enthusiasts and disc jockeys to use, according to the company. [Gallery: Futuristic 'Smart Textiles' Merge Fashion with Tech]

Users of the glove will be able to compose music, play and perform on the go, said Mark DeMay, co-founder and chief technology officer at Remidi. It can be thought of as a wearable MIDI controller, DeMay said, referring to the music synthesizers found in recording studios that let producers combine tracks, tweak vocals and adjust tempos.

But the glove is actually much more adaptable than the large synthesizer machines, and can be personalized to create new, custom sounds or remix existing ones, depending on how a user programs it.

"We wanted to give people a fun way to express themselves and start pushing the boundaries of what we can do with musical instruments," DeMay told Live Science.

The idea for the wearable music instrument was born when Remidi founder and CEO, Andrea Baldereschi, and DeMay met while working at Livid Instruments, an Austin, Texas-based company that designs MIDI controllers and mixers for DJs. Baldereschi had been a DJ for a number of years and would always tap out new beats whenever they were working together, DeMay said.

But he often forgot the new melodies before he could get around to recording the music, so Baldereschi decided he wanted to invent a way to record riffs on the go, without being limited to working in rooms with bulky, burdensome digital music systems.

"The digital world has gotten a little bit stagnant in terms of the MIDI controllers," DeMay said. "They all kind of do the same stuff, in the same way. They're all buttons, knobs, LEDs and faders, just in a different arrangement," he said. "The T8 glove is something truly different."

With the T8, a user could start jamming on any surface — a desk, wall, subway seat, park bench, car window, or on their own body. The data from the glove can then be sent to the Remidi app or to other recording software, DeMay said.

The T8 creates different sound intensities and rhythms based on which of its eight sensors you press, what combinations you press, and how long or how hard you press down on each point. And a tiny spinninggyroscope and accelerometer in the glove's wristband measures how fast your hand moves up and down or left and right, and adjusts the tone and tempo of the music you create in real-time.

"The glove's really adaptable as far as what is does," DeMay said. A prototype of the glove won a number of awards for its features and design, including the Marzotto CLN Corporate Price in Milan, and the Jury's Special Prize at the Wearable 2016 Awards in Paris.

Remidi's Kickstarter campaign raised more than $130,000 — nearly triple its original goal of $50,000. People can purchase a T8 for $349 through the company's pre-sale until September, DeMay said. After that, Remidi plans to sell the T8 for $399.

Whoa! Mind-Controlled Arm Lets Man Move Prosthetic Fingers

A new mind-controlled prosthetic arm was used to help a patient wiggle the device's fingers simply by thinking about it, and required very little training on the patient's part, according to a new study.

The research, though still in its nascent stages, could potentially help people who have lost arms due to injury or disease regain some mobility, the researchers said.

"We believe this is the first time a person using a mind-controlled prosthesis has immediately performed individual digit movements without extensive training," study senior author Dr. Nathan Crone, a professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement. "This technology goes beyond available prostheses, in which the artificial digits, or fingers, moved as a single unit to make a grabbing motion, like one used to grip a tennis ball." [Body Beautiful: The 5 Strangest Prosthetic Limbs]

However, the man in the experiment was not missing an arm or a hand. He was at the hospital for epilepsy treatment, and was already scheduled to undergo brain mapping so that doctors could determine where the seizures started in his brain, the researchers said. 

Doctors surgically implanted electrodes into the man's brain to track his seizures. But they also mapped and found the specific areas of his brain that move each finger, from the thumb to the pinkie.

That was no easy feat. A neurosurgeon carefully placed an array of 128 electrode sensors — all on a rectangular film the size of a business card — on the region of the man's brain that controls hand and arm movements. Each sensor covered a small, circular spot on the brain that measured 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) in diameter.

After the implantation, researchers asked the man to wiggle different fingers. The team noted which parts of his brain "lit up" when the sensors detected neural electrical activity from each finger movement.

The team also noted which parts of the brain were involved in feeling touch. They gave the man a glove that vibrated at the tip of each finger. Again, the researchers identified the different areas of the brain that "lit up" when the man felt the vibrations on his fingers.

After collecting the motor (movement) and sensory data, the researchers programmed the prosthetic arm, which was developed at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Whenever a certain part of the man's brain expressed electrical activity, the prosthetic would move a corresponding finger.

This turned the electrode sensors into the ultimate mind-reading machine. Researchers connected the electrodes to the prosthesis, and asked the man to think about moving his fingers one at a time. Within moments of when the man moved his real fingers, the fingers on the prosthetic arm moved, too.

"The electrodes used to measure brain activity in this study gave us better resolution of a large region of cortex than anything we've used before and allowed for more precise spatial mapping in the brain," said Guy Hotson, a graduate student and lead author of the study. "This precision is what allowed us to separate the control of individual fingers." [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]

Handy accuracy

At first, the mind-controlled arm was accurate just 76 percent of the time. But then, researchers coupled the ring and pinkie fingers together, which increased the accuracy to 88 percent, they said.

"The part of the brain that controls the pinkie and ring fingers overlaps, and most people move the two fingers together," Crone said. "It makes sense that coupling these two fingers improved the accuracy."

Moreover, the device is easy to use, and doesn't require extensive training, the researchers said.

Yet, the technology is still years away from clinical use, and it will likely be expensive, the researchers said. But it would undoubtedly help many people. There are more than 100,000 people living in the United States with amputated hands or arms, according to the Amputee Coalition of America, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization that represents people who have experienced limb loss or amputation.

There are already myriad technologies designed to help people with missing limbs. For instance, advances in prosthetic limbs and artificial skin are helping to restore a sense of touch for people, even if they've lost extremities. 

HoloLens 'Teleports' NASA Scientist to Mars in TED Talk Demo

Something amazing happened at the TED2016 conference today: HoloLens developer Alex Kipman "teleported" a NASA scientist onto the stage, on the surface of Mars.

Jeff Norris of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was physically across the street from the auditorium in Vancouver, Canada, but with the HoloLens cameras, a hologram of him (a three-dimensional, talking hologram, which is made entirely of light) was beamed onto the stage where a virtual Mars surface was waiting.

"I'm actually in three places," Norris said. "I'm standing in a room across the street, while I'm standing on the stage with you, while I'm standing on Mars a hundred million miles away." [See Photos of the HoloLens Experience and Teleported Scientist]

Kipman demoed the HoloLens for the audience and, for the first time, revealed this new holographic teleportation aspect of the technology.

"I invite you to experience, for the first time anywhere in the world, here on the TED stage a real-life holographic teleportation…," Kipman said. When Norris, wearing a NASA T-shirt and baseball cap appeared onstage (his hologram, that is), Kipman was ecstatic. "Woo. That worked," he said.

The alien scape on which Norris stood was a holographic replica of the planet created from data collected by NASA's Curiosity rover.

To infinity and beyond

Kipman sees the technology as a game-changer for the world. Today, he says, humans are limited by our two-dimensional interaction with the world, through monitors and other screens.

"Put simply I want to create a new reality," Kipman said. "A reality where technology brings us infinitely closer to each other, a reality where people, not devices, are at the center of everything. I dream of a reality where technology senses what we see, touch and feel, a reality where technology no longer gets in the way but instead embraces who we are."

Enter the HoloLens: "This is the next step in the evolution. This is Microsoft Hololens, the first fully untethered holographic computer," said Kipman. "I'm talking about freeing ourselves from the 2D confines of traditional computing." [Here's How the Microsoft HoloLens Works]

The technology relies on a fish-eye camera lens, loads of sensors and a holographic processing unit, according to Microsoft.

And to allow the viewer to walk around in their own environment overlaid with various holograms, the devices maps your home or any surroundings in real-time. "The HoloLens maps in real-time at about five frames per second with this technology we call spatial mapping. So in your home as soon as you put it on holograms will start showing up and you'll start placing them, you'll start learning your home," Kipman said.

For the demo, where Kipman's headset was wirelessly linked to big screens, the HoloLens relied on stored information. "In a stage environment where we're trying to get something on my head to communicate with something over there with all of the wireless connectivity that usually brings all conferences down we don't take the risk of trying to do this live," Kipman said. "So what we do is we pre-map the stage at five frames per second with the same spatial mapping technology that you'll use with the product at home and then we store it."For the demo, where Kipman's headset was wirelessly linked to big screens, the HoloLens relied on stored information. "In a stage environment where we're trying to get something on my head to communicate with something over there with all of the wireless connectivity that usually brings all conferences down we don't take the risk of trying to do this live," Kipman said. "So what we do is we pre-map the stage at five frames per second with the same spatial mapping technology that you'll use with the product at home and then we store it."

Demoing more of the HoloLens experience, Kipman shows the audience what he sees through the headset as he dials his world from reality toward the imaginary, turning people in the audience, for instance, into elves with wings.

Exploring with HoloLens

The technology is already being put to good use in the scientific and consumer realm.

Medical students at Case Western University are using HoloLens to learn about medicine and the human body in an augmented-reality world; Volvo has developed a partnership with Microsoft to use the HoloLens for both design of their cars and as a way to enhance consumers' experiences with their vehicles and brand.

And Kipman's "personal favorite" — NASA is using the technology to let scientists explore planets holographically, a partnership dubbed OnSight.

"Today a group of scientists on our mission are seeing Mars as never before, an alien world made a little more familiar because they are finally exploring it as humans should," Norris said of the ability to use HoloLens to experience the planet as if one were there. "But our dreams don't have to end with making it just like being there. If we dial this real world to the virtual, we can do magical things. We can see in invisible wavelengths or teleport to the top of a mountain. Perhaps some day we'll feel the minerals in a rock just by touching it."

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have HoloLens headsets so that scientists on Earth can assist them as if both were in the same place.

Optical magnetometer performs first-ever noninvasive detection of nerve impulses

It’s surprisingly difficult to pinpoint what a given nerve is doing at any given moment. The electrochemical dance of neuronal function never stops, and it’s synced to the beat of the default mode network more strongly than to any external clock. Neurons are constantly receiving and transmitting information, but an electrical action potential is measured in millivolts and only changes the magnetic field around a neuron by a few picoTesla.

Up ’til now, this tiny variance has meant we needed invasive methods to get any information whatsoever about the function of living nerves. Now, scientists from Denmark have used a game-changing device for an all-new neuronal imaging technique: an optical magnetometer that can measure a single nerve’s function from outside the body — with quantum-level precision.

Today’s best methods of discerning a nerve’s function are still pretty invasive. Either we have to stick an electrode into a nerve, which is pretty disruptive, or we have to actually dissect a creature and thread one of its neurons through a tiny conductive coil on a machine called a SQUID. Either way, we’re not very good at getting information out of nerves in vivo. And neuroscience has needed another way of looking at nerves in real-time from outside the body, preferably at room temperature.

That’s where the optical magnetometer comes in. These devices work because they use a laser that detects the change in polarization of gaseous cesium atoms when they’re subjected to a changing magnetic field. The flux induced by an electric action potential causes a flutter in the polarized light, which the magnetometer can detect. And the sensitivity of these devices is unparalleled: Their resolution is limited only by quantum effects like the quantum shot noise of light.

The breakthrough here is in the application. This kind of magnetometry has never before been applied to living cells, in part because the magnetic flux generated by an action potential is so very small: nine orders of magnitude smaller than your average fridge magnet. That kind of precision is pretty hard to get at all, to say nothing of using it in vivo. But the combination of how it uses the laser and the tiny size of the sensor end means this device can point at a nerve and see what that particular nerve is doing, to the exclusion of fibers around it. Jensen and co. tried it out on a frog, and used the magnetometer to detect when its sciatic nerve was firing.

A discovery like this has the potential to change the entire brain-imaging field. The team that did this project notes “The magnetometer [is] perfect for medical diagnostics in physiological/clinical areas such as cardiography of fetuses, synaptic responses in the retina, and magnetoencephalography,” or presumably anything else that requires noninvasive brain imaging in the time domain. And it won’t be long until we’re using this technique on humans. This is a clear step forward for both basic research and the biomedical sciences alike.

Machine revolution to snatch away 5 million jobs from humans

Robots are waiting to takeover your job.

The "Fourth Industrial Evolution" is already happening, according to a report from the World Economic Forum, which focuses on how technological change is influences the workplace and global economies at its meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland. Advancement in fields such as robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence will alter workplaces and the necessary new skills from workers in the years to come, according to "The Future of Jobs" report.

Not everyone will be affected the same way, with the report confirming that the jobs at high risks are office and administrative roles. Other industries with negative job forcast includes manufacturing and production, the arts and entertainment, construction and extraction, and installation and maintenance. In all, automation and robotics will result in 5.1 million job losses over the next five years, the researchers found.

"As all industries adjust,all occupations are moving through a fundamental change," wrote World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab and managing board member Richard Samans in the report. "While certain jobs are under threat by redundancy and others emerge rapidly, existing jobs are also passing through a change in the skill sets needed to do them."

The findings are based on a survey of 371 global companies with more than 13 million employees in 15 major advanced and emerging economies.

Office and administrative jobs will face what the report calls "a perfect storm of technological trends." Mobile internet and cloud technology will make some jobs redundant, while big data analytics and the Internet of things will also reduce the need for workers in these roles, the research found.

Around 7.1 million jobs will be cut down, with two-thirds of those losses centered on office and administrative categories. That will be somewhat offset by the gain of 2 million new jobs in areas such as business and financial operations. The net result? About 5.1 million fewer jobs overall by 2020, the report noted.

While that might seem frightening, especially to office managers, the World Economic Forum's forecast is hardly predicting the kind of doom that Oxford researchers predicted last year. According to that report, almost half of U.S. jobs are at risk, with household service robots and automation projected to sharply reduce the need for workers.

The job market is already changing rapidly in response to the Fourth Industrial Evolution, with employers seeking workers with STEM-related skills and experience. But almost four out of 10 employers report having difficulties finding qualified workers, which suggests that the education system isn't retooling quickly enough to provide students with the skills they'll need to survive in the labor market.

"It is simply not possible to weather the current technological revolution by waiting for the next generation's workforce to become better prepared," the report noted. "Instead it is critical that businesses take a commanding role in supporting their current workforces through re-training, that individuals take a proactive approach to their own lifelong learning."

While "The Future of Work" doesn't delve into economic inequality, their forecast has troubling implications for how the robotics revolution may aggravate already widening gaps between the haves and have-nots, based on issues ranging from gender to geographic location.

Any industrial revolution comes with growing pains, and among those most likely to feel the brunt of it are women, given that some of the fields with the highest projected growth -- such as in computers and math -- have the lowest rates of female workforce participation. That underscores the need to reexamine why women aren't pursuing so-called STEM fields, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Because STEM-related jobs tend to pay higher salaries than other industries, it means fewer women may reach earnings parity with their male cohorts in the coming years.

And then there is the widening gap between rich and poor countries. The Fourth Industrial Revolution could make that worse, with poor countries losing jobs to automation, increasing the jobless rates there and creating even bigger refugee waves. The Middle East and North Africa have the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, and many of the countries in those regions are failing to equip their youths with the skills necessarily to thrive in a world driven by AIs, robots, and automation, the report noted.

"The region runs the risk of worsening unemployment and talent shortages if skills gaps are exacerbated due to technological changes that further disrupt business models and labour markets," it warned.

The first human brain-to-brain interface has been created. In the future, will we all be linked telepathically?

International researchers are reporting that they have built the first human-to-human brain-to-brain interface, allowing two humans — separated by the internet — to consciously communicate with each other, with no additional sensory cues. One researcher, attached to a brain-computer interface (BCI) in India, successfully sent words into the brain of another researcher in France, who was wearing a computer-to-brain interface (CBI). In short, the researchers have created a device that enables telepathy. In the future, rather than vocalizing speech — or vainly attempting to vocalize your emotions — your friend/lover/family member might just pluck those words and thoughts right out of your head.

Over the last few years, researchers have started to get quite good at reading your brain activity — your thoughts. Commercial brain-computer interfaces that you can plug into your computer’s USB port have been around for a good four or five years now, and in the last couple of years we’ve seen advanced BCIs that can be implanted directly into your brain. To create a brain-to-brain connection (i.e. telepathy) you also need the other side of the equation, however: You need to be able to take some data and input it into someone else’s brain — and that, as you can imagine, is proving to be a bit harder

 
USB-connected BCIs, like the one here by Emotiv, have been around for years.

Now, however, a team of international researchers have cracked it. On the BCI side of things, the researchers used a fairly standard EEG (electroencephalogram) from Neuroelectrics. For the CBI, which requires a more involved setup, a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) rig was used. TMS is somewhat similar to TDCS, in that it can stimulate regions of neurons in your brain — but instead of electrical current, it uses magnetism. The important thing is that TMS is non-invasive — it can stimulate your brain (and thus cause you to think or feel a certain way) without having to actually cut into your brain and use some electrodes (see: deep brain stimulation).

    

This is how the brain-to-brain system works. The BCI reads the sender’s thoughts — in this case, the sender thinks about moving his or her hands or feet. Thinking about feet is equivalent to binary 0, while hands is binary 1. With a little time/effort, whole words can be encoded as a stream of ones and zeroes. These encoded words are then transmitted (via the internet or some other network) to the recipient, who is wearing a TMS. The TMS is focused on on the recipient’s visual cortex. When the TMS receives a “1″ from the sender, it stimulates a region in the visual cortex that produces a phosphene — the phenomenon whereby you see flashes of light, without light actually hitting your retina (when you rub your eyes, for example). The recipient “sees” these phosphenes at the bottom of their visual field. By decoding the flashes — phosphene flash = 1, no phosphene = 0 — the recipient can “read” the word being sent.

You would be right in thinking that this is a rather complex and long-winded way of sending messages from one brain to another — but for now, this is truly the state of the art. As you can see, this method very neatly sidesteps the fact that we really don’t know how the human brain encodes information — and so, for now, instead of importing a “native” message, we have to use our own encoding scheme (binary) and a quirk of the visual cortex. [Research paper: doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105225 - "Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technologies"]

    
The actual brain-to-brain setup. Sender/EEG on the left, receiver/TMS on the right


Still, even if it does seem a little bit like hard work, there’s no denying that this is a conscious, non-invasive brain-to-brain connection. While the recipient isn’t going anywhere fast (the TMS is bulky), it’s not hard to imagine a small, lightweight EEG that allows the sender to constantly stream thoughts back to the receiver. I’m sure we’re not more than a few years away from a setup that allows the receiver to walk around, too — at which point, assuming we make some progress in decoding the brain’s activity, you basically have a persistent brain-to-brain link that would allow you to always know what your friends/family/loved ones are thinking. You might use such a telepathy system for sending simple thoughts from a distance — I love you — or maybe it could be useful for truly getting inside someone’s head when they’re struggling to voice their emotions.
The future is going to be a fun and/or scary and/or amazing place to live in, friends.
EXTREMETECH