Silicon
Chip Sheds Light on Retinal Disease-After 33 years of darkness, Bob Rosene can
now see light. The 68-year-old retired computer programmer can’t make out images
or shadows, but the dark shade of blindness that has blocked his vision for all
those years is now more translucent, he says, and light has begun seeping in.
Technology
Lends a Hand-When Rugers professor William Craelius and one of his biomedical
engineering graduate students decided to develop an improved hand prosthesis,
they first took note of what hand amputees said they needed most—the ability to
tap a finger on a computer
keyboard. Exisiting artificial hands didn’t allow that. Their one or two
hfingers and a thumb could only grasp and hold things. But graduate student
Ricki Abboudi and Craelius, director of the Orthotics and Prosthetics Laboratory
at Rutgers’ Departments of Biomedical Engineering, thought finger taping—even
though a big step forward in hand prostheses—wasn’t enough. Instead, they set as
their goal an artificial hand that could perform light office work, including
typing and using a mouse. Now, the latest version of their hand prosthesis, with
improvements from other graduate students, is doing that. One amputee has even
used it to play the piano.
Medical Models-On August 6, fifty
medical professionals at Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA prepared to
undertake a rare and delicate surgery: the separation of one-year-old Maria
Teresa Quiej Alvarez and her sister Maria de Jesus, craniopagus twins, joined at
the head. Doctors were well rehearsed. Before sliping on their surgical gloves,
they had practiced their routines down to each incision, using exact replicas of
the girls’ anatomy—rapid prototypes created from computerized tomography (CT)
scans taken two months earlier.
Inactive Models get Bionic Boost-
A new device under development at the Alfred E. Mann Institute at the University
of Southern California (USC) promises to help patients suffering from a huge
range of disabilities caused by weak and paralyzed muscles. The tiny,
individually addressable, single channel electrical stimulator, trademarked by
the Institute under the name BION (BIONic neuron), does not require surgery, but
rather can be injected by any physician into one or more muscles through a
12-gauge hypodermic needle. Power and appropriate control data reach each ION
via an externally worn radio frequency (RF) device.
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