Word: motion
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While so far only this bypass procedure has received the FDA's blessing, trials are under way to robotically repair the heart's valves, place pacemaker wires and stabilize irregular heartbeats. In Canada, a rival system from Computer Motion in Santa Barbara, Calif., is being tested for fetal-heart surgery. Douglas Boyd, who heads the National Center for Advanced Surgery and Robotics in London, Ont., believes that robots' minimally invasive techniques could vastly improve fetal surgery's current 90% failure rate, which he says is primarily a result of the trauma placed on the womb by traditional surgical techniques. "Robots...
...Machine Haptics (also known as the Touch Lab) and the State University of New York Health Science Center, Nicolelis implanted electrodes into the sections of the monkeys' brains in which the planning and execution of arm movements takes place. When the brain instructs the body to make a motion, it fires off electric signals well before any action actually takes place; in other words, the body lags slightly behind the brain's intention to act. In effect, the brain warms up for an impending movement by directing specific clusters of neurons to fire, just as you might warm up your...
...that practically defines the cutting edge of wired-home technology. Built into a corner of a large office block, it's a 160-sq-m monument to every techie's fantasy. The place is bristling with gadgetry. Apart from the usual household appliances and entertainment systems, there are webcams, motion sensors, and electronic photoframes - thin lcds where you can show off several photos at the same time from that Hawaiian holiday or switch pictures depending on who's visiting. Everything in the home seems to communicate with every other thing. You can watch TV on the computer, do e-mail...
Behind LiLi's free will, in fact, is an actress speaking into a mike while strapped into a motion-capture device (when she waves hello, so does LiLi), an animator punching keys for more subtle movements and about $50,000 of software. She's a high-tech, multilingual, digital puppet, Howdy Doody with sex appeal. But LiLi wants to be real. "I'm striving to be more and more human with each passing day," she says with an earnestness that would make Geppetto proud...
...difficulty swallowing. It worsened to the point where she couldn't eat at all; she was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. Traditional surgery involves an incision from the throat down to the belly button. "It's a very violent operation," says cardiothoracic surgeon Murali Dharan, making a digging motion with his hands. With the da Vinci, Dharan was able to remove Tichtchenko's cancerous esophagus and move her stomach up much higher - to allow her to feed herself minus her swallowing mechanism - through small incisions in her neck. "I'd watched E.R. on TV at home, but I never...