Paralyzed Tennis Player With Robotic Exoskeleton Carries Olympic Torch

A paralyzed tennis player carried the Olympic flame through Paris using a robotic exoskeleton that helped him walk again. The tennis player is the first real para-athlete to wear a self-balancing exoskeleton during the Olympics. These self-balancing exoskeletons are battery-operated and offer personalized support to the legs and torsos of people who have lost the ability to walk due to health conditions ranging from strokes to paralysis. The devices also have sensors that can detect when wearers want to stand by reading upper body movement using bespoke algorithms.

Wandercraft's exoskeletons have only been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States since the end of 2022, and for stroke rehabilitation. In France, however, roughly 20 of the robotic exoskeletons had been deployed to hospitals to help patients walk again, at around $176,000 a pop. But with the establishment of a campus in New York City to continue making the devices even more autonomous, it may not be long before Wandercraft's robotic exoskeletons, or others like them, are seen in the streets of the United States, too.

More information:

https://nz.news.yahoo.com/paralyzed-tennis-player-carries-olympic-164622883.html

Drones Imitate the Snapshot Memory of Insects

TU Delft researchers took observations from the insect world and apply them to a 56-gram flying drone equipped with a tiny camera and a cheap processor. The researchers created an indoor obstacle course and several snapshots images for the drone to reference. Snapshots were placed with as much distance between them as possible to ensure reduced the number of total images the drone had to store. That, in turn, means the drone required less memory capacity. 

The minimalist drones were able to home-in on a memory-stored snapshot and move from point to point through the course like a chain link before eventually returning to its home base. In the end, the drone was able to successfully travel 100 meters around the course using just 0.65 kiloBytes of memory. All of the visual computing needed for the insect-inspired robot to complete the course occurred on a common microcontroller often found in cheap consumer electronics.

More information:

https://www.popsci.com/technology/drones-ants-memory/

Digital Twins for Swimmers

Mathematics, physics and technology have revolutionized swimming. The idea is that biomechanical and hydrodynamic minutiae are variables in a complex physical and mathematical problem. By optimizing these variables, swimmers can reach near perfection. Today the advent of sensor technology has turned this idea into a reality in which mathematics and physics produce useful information so that coaches can precision-train 2024 Olympic hopefuls. The results have been enormously successful. This Summer Olympics will be the first time that nine of the elite swimmers will be guided by their digital twin. Since 2015 teams of researchers at Emory University and the University of Virginia, have been equipping swimmers with devices called inertial measurement units to record their body’s acceleration, orientation and force. Unlike typical digital video, which records 24 frames per second, these sensors capture information 512 times a second.

While the swimmers go through a battery of tests wearing these sensors on their wrists, ankles or back, the data show the impact on their acceleration from every rotation, splash, pull and kick. Advanced sensors that measure force generated by an athlete’s hands are used to measure the pressure differential between the palm and the side of the hand, revealing the direction of the force. What was previously evaluated purely by looking at the swimmer above the water can now be distilled into a series of charts and graphs that show the distribution of force in all the forward, sideways, and upward and downward directions. Force applied in any direction other than forward is wasted force. These streams of numbers are used to create an athlete’s digital twin, which captures their movements down to the millisecond. A database of digital twins from more than 100 of the best U.S. swimmers has been created.

More information:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/training-with-digital-twins-could-boost-olympic-swimmer-speeds/