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Bionic Implants and Spectrum Clash
angry tapir writes "The battle over scarce radio spectrum that has embroiled the mobile broadband world even extends to a little-known type of wireless network that promises to reconnect the human nervous system with paralyzed limbs. At its monthly meeting next week, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will consider whether four sets of frequencies between 413MHz and 457MHz can be used by networks of sensors implanted in patients who suffer from various forms of paralysis. One intended purpose of these MMNS (medical micropower network systems) is to transmit movement commands from a sensor on a patient's spinal cord, through a wearable MCU (master control unit), to implants that electrically stimulate nerves."
Part 16 just got a lot more interesting. Devices must accept harmful interference, including interference which may cause undesired operation. Sound familiar? So if your prosthetic arm starts punching you repeatedly in the face until you're dead, ah well... these things happen!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
suddenly visions of light cycles and disc wars came to mind....
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Used to work there, some of the most brilliant people work in that building. Quirky, but brilliant.
I hope they're using a packet based protocol with massive error correction.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What prevents a multi-frequency technology like spread spectrum from reliably taking advantage of this, and a wider range of other frequencies?
The fact that wireless signals might move the body randomly (or worse), seems dangerous. What about conductive tattoos instead?
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
why wifi what happens when more then one person is in the same area with the implants.
.. Please turn off your arms and legs during takeoff.
This is one of the cases where you need reliability.
If I hijack the connection could I remotely control them?
- Stepho
I've not been huge fan of Wifi, but wow does this open a new can worms if artifical limbs get into the mix
I hope they put some seriously good protection for patients who get wifi type artifical limbs and other associated implants using WIFI.
Some person with not much for morals could think it be fun hack someone's implants take them for ride or do pranks.
would bring them to their knees....
From the sound of it, prosthetic designers and engineers are planning devices that operate on single frequencies.
The animal brains and nervous systems operate quite a bit differently. The signals do not often rely in a single path or a single signal to make things happen. To transmit a true, low-power signal, multiple paths and multiple signal details are transmitted where it is the collection of these signals which spell out the truth. If there are minor glitches, interferences or inhibitions along the way, the general signal still gets through most of the time.
If they are thinking of making a brain to prosthetic control signalling system based on wireless communications, it would be a huge mistake not to use multiple signals and frequencies to make things happen as this is the way the brain and the nervous system already does things.
I find this to be the mistake they are likely to make as they made the same mistake with artificial blood circulation system which are intended to keep the body alive during heart surgeries. Initially, they just hooked up a streaming pump and wondered why the body wasn't working or surviving under that condition. Well, turns out that the body NEEDS the pumping and gushing style of blood circulation because as the blood is pushed, it still needs those moments of pause to absorb and distribute oxygen and other stuff like that.
I expect the mistake to be made. Now let's sit back and wait for it to come true.
...probably isn't that far away from happening, even if you argue that brain signals are too complex to analyze, the human body too complicated to replicate. When that future comes, you can bet there will be a non-negligible population of (possibly remote) prosthetic body users, and the required bands of frequencies (even taking into account such development as cognitive radio) will definitely be more than just four. Seeing how the wireless space is crowded now, how do we overcome this?
Just so you know, some folks who are far more technologically advanced than us have worked out a solution to this problem. That's why the Visitors have settled on the standard anal implant interface.
The augs are already here!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Falls right in the middle of the ham bands....
Actually, no to that last one. But the rest about redundancy is spot-on.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Ham radio operators can legally transmit 1500W on the frequeny range from 420MHz to 450 MHz in the US.
Also, you better not try this near a PAVE PAWS radar station. They output up to 580kW in the same frequency band.
This is not a problem. You take a body stocking made of lycra (this serves both as a scaffolding for signal transmission and reception and with small actuators it could also serve to enhance circulation, exercise muscle groups and protect the wearer from minor scrapes and scratches.) On the skin side of the suit, you place a mesh of conductive fibers and control nodes all over the entire body creating a large network of antennas for transmitting and receiving signals anywhere on the body. The outside of the body suit has a tight mesh attached to a device that converts ambient RF energy into useable electricity. It also serves as a highly effective barrier between signals inside and outside of the suit. By ensuring that the signals inside the suit are at least a couple orders of magnitude larger than the signals from outside the suit, the problem of unwanted control of the users limbs is rendered moot.
One other idea might be to make the suit opaque and use an optical network with light fibers and choose IR frequencies that pass readily through human flesh to the neural interfaces. This produces no external signals if the suit is in fact optically opaque, and the isolation from the external environment would be absolute (save the flash from something like a thermonuclear device and then the crosstalk with the bionics is probably the least of one's concerns :-)
It's simple: we take every journalist who ever misunderstood quantum entanglement and assumed that it was a viable method of information-passing, and then make them interact at a subatomic level so that they adopt opposite spins (one liberal, the other conservative.) To pass information, we simply adjust the spin on one of the journalists, and due to misunderstanding quantum entanglement, his or her partner will automatically adopt the opposite spin.
Then we do this several billion times per second.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The age of mobile phones and satellites has made astounding improvements in transmitting and receiving RF energy. Why is the spectrum so limited? Why can't we squeeze thousands of times more sub bands inside any signaling band? Why shouldn't a 1MHz wide band hold as many channels now as an entire GHz used to hold when we weren't as good at this?
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make install -not war
Whatever happened to using a phased array to either/both direct a beam to a point, or to detect the point from which an omnidirectional transmission was received? Shouldn't these little grids be cheap and common by now? Then we wouldn't have to register every frequency to a licensed operator, but instead any signal would be a unique station based on where it came from and/or where it was sent.
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make install -not war
Your garage door opener is using the same channel as my penile implant. Quit hitting the 'down' button when I'm getting it on with the wife.
Have gnu, will travel.
This sounds like a perfect recipe for meat puppets and remote crime!
Slightly off-topic, but as this technology becomes more practical in terms of day-to-day use (ie: it actually helps a physically disabled person significantly, and is well beyond the proof-of-concept and various stages of cost analysis and FCC regulations), would it be possible that people could find these solutions being awarded in court cases?
I've noted a number of car accidents in North America over the years as they pop up in small-time newspapers, and a few months later the defendant is lucky to get $200,000 in compensation for a drunk driver killing the victim's kid and putting the victim in a wheelchair or worse for life. But wait, $200k, isn't that a lot? Not when your friend who just died was a chemical engineer pulling in almost the same per year for his family, who now has no income.
What if this technology can repair the physical damage to one's own body, but it costs, say $1,500,000. Is it possible for the judge to say "repair the damage you did". For loss of life, this is a very messy issue that pulls in ethics, epistemological debates, legal debates, limitations of liability, etc. But let's just consider the case of a drunk driver who can't claim the "alcoholism made me do it" defense. Would it be right, ethical, legal, or even possible to garnish their wages until they die of old age or kill themselves (and have first dibs at life insurance) so they can repair the damage done from one person being too cheap to call a cab when plastered? I think it would be very fitting.
"The defendant claims that the stress and guilt of this incident will affect him for the rest of his/her life". Well, here's a way to be sure of it while letting them retain their personal freedom to go about their day without being behind bars. Even better if the drunk is a sociopath or just selfish and reckless.
... I call it "linksys"
I hope I'm not the only person who imagined this technology being used in a Dutch Rudder scenario.
You take a body stocking made of lycra (this serves both as a scaffolding for signal transmission and reception and with small actuators it could also serve to enhance circulation, exercise muscle groups and protect the wearer from minor scrapes and scratches.) On the skin side of the suit, you place a mesh of conductive fibers and control nodes all over the entire body creating a large network of antennas for transmitting and receiving signals anywhere on the body.
But it won't help you deal with the alien navigator if you're blind, no matter now good a telepath you are. Just go ahead and hand the assignment over to Spock.
Let's hope that this slice of the spectrum stays out of the hands of private industry, or at least is very heavily regulated.
I can just see a telecom sending a disabled vet a notice saying that he has exceeded his data cap for his wireless network and will now be charged $20 per each additional MB.
Plus, his bandwidth will be cut in half.
And he can only purchase peripherals (like fingers) from his wireless provider, so they can "guarantee a uniformly excellent end-user experience".
It is for future applications like this that we really need to establish very seriously enforced Net Neutrality right away.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I need a hand here. No, wait....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Initially, they just hooked up a streaming pump and wondered why the body wasn't working or surviving under that condition. Well, turns out that the body NEEDS the pumping and gushing style of blood circulation because as the blood is pushed, it still needs those moments of pause to absorb and distribute oxygen and other stuff like that.
No, it doesn't. By the time the blood gets to your capillaries, there's little pulse left. They're working on artificial hearts right now that'll leave patients with no pulse at all:
http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/stories/new-artificial-heart-keeps-you-alive-without-a-pulse
Is Lee Majors still alive?
I, for one, welcome our new botnet overlords.
One clarification - the heart may need those pulses, but the rest of the body does not seem to need them. From NPR June 13th 2011, "Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life": "The pulsatility of the flow is essential for the heart, because it can only get nourishment in between heartbeats," Cohn says. "If you remove that from the system, none of the other organs seem to care much."
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/13/137029208/heart-with-no-beat-offers-hope-of-new-lease-on-life
Wireless? Sounds really 'secure' ....
'I did not kill him! At some moment my limbs started to moving by themselves... someone must've hacked into me!'
This is another example of some organization selling off what belongs to everybody. It would be a different proposition if we were to decide who would get this bandwidth, at no charge. I posit that this would resolve a great many issues.
Your wife wants it hooked up to an oscillating control signal... maybe your bittorrent up/down monitor?
huh huh... teledildonics.
Don't forget that they can only be used once and then have to be discarded! Oh, if only that were true of politicians too!
Unfortunately the only flaw with such a system is that, unlike most forms of communication based on misunderstood quantum entanglement, your information gets leaked to the public before it arrives.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!