Slashdot Mirror
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
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
.. Please turn off your arms and legs during takeoff.
would bring them to their knees....
Reed-Solomon can correct bit errors, Turbo Codes can correct block errors, and if you also include a cryptographic hash of the packet you can determine if the corrections fixed the data or it is still corrupt. Depending on the bandwidth consumed by the actual data, you might be able to throw in a lot of error correction bits and even have the error correction checksummed and error-corrected.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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!
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 :-)
Why not go the whole way and encrypt the whole signal? Then you'd have to handshake with your hands every morning.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The Shannon-Hartley Theorem places a fundamental limit on the data rate you can squeeze into a given bandwidth (for a given noise level). That said, I believe current technology is nowhere near this limit.
Score: i, Imaginary