Human-Machine Integration

Biomedical Advances from Past Battlefields It seems appropriate to begin this discussion on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, often called the bloodiest day in U.S. military history. Why? because the American Civil War is seen by many military historians to be the first

Imagine not dying….ever! Instead all of your thoughts get uploaded to a computer brain in the body of a robot and you continue to experience consciousness through the machine’s memory circuits. Well that’s a story that caught my eye this morning as I was reading thro

NASA and the Russian space program have impacted our world well beyond giving us a glimpse of what it looks like from the Moon and low-Earth orbit. I came across a number of lists in the last few days and compiled a single one which I thought I would share with you. By all means this

The expression “in a heartbeat” may not have the same meaning in the future if technology under development has a say. Conventional thinking on replacing the heart with a device that works the same way as the heart is being turned on its head by devices that don’t be

Animals come in many shapes and forms. Insects and other arthropods share a common physical attribute. They wear their skeletons on the outside. We call them invertebrates. Humans and other mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, called vertebrates, have an internal or endoskel

In our last blog we introduced HeartLander, a device that when inserted into the chest cavity can deliver medication, ablation therapy and provide assistance in lead placement for pacing the heart muscle. HeartLander’s developers hope to shrink it to 3 millimetres from its curre

Biomechanics is the biological equivalent of a human-computer duopoly. A duopoly is normally a marketing term describing a situation in which there are only two sellers. So I’m taking poetic license in using the term and doing so to describe what is both a convergence of humanit

In Part 3 we neglected to discuss the use of virtual reality for assessment and rehabilitation related to physical injuries, brain trauma and neuropsychological problems. Computer simulation and video gaming are the new tools in this field. The following describes the use of these tec

Humanity is closer today to immortality than it has ever been. We have surpassed Darwinian survival of the fittest to reach a new stage in evolution, creating humans reshaped by advances in biology combined with technology. In the 21st century one of our human challenges will be ̵