IEEE Spectrum

For years, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have promised to help people with severe paralysis communicate. The technology is still experimental, but more researchers and companies like Neuralink and Synchron are now testing these devices in human clinical trials . Geneva-based Ability Neurotech is the latest to join their ranks, as it gears up to move its optical BCI from brief tests during surg…

When Ryan Hudson-Peralta, a self-described “Apple fanboy,” isn’t using the computer, he’s on his phone. But all of this screentime—and mouse use—can take a toll on his body. Hudson-Peralta , a designer, speaker, and disability advocate, was born with no hands and uses a wheelchair. “With my disability, I was born without shoulder sockets,” he says, and using a traditional computer mouse for an ex…

On 12 August, just before sunset, a strip of the Iberian Peninsula will witness its first total solar eclipse in more than 120 years. For many across the region, this is a rare chance to see the moon block out the sun. For one group of researchers, it’s an even rarer chance to record the human body’s reaction to that awesome phenomenon . For the first time, scientists will monitor those observers…

Supplying power to bioelectronic implants is essential for long-term operations. However, placing a socket on them can invite invasions from microbial intruders, and wireless charging antennas are often bulky. Now scientists have created a new implantable power outlet accessible via needle they say can overcome the challenges faced by previous charging techniques. “It is intended to serve as a ge…

Researchers in China have developed a soft exoskeleton for the lower body that is completely motor-free and is driven instead by high-power artificial muscles. The harness reduces the amount of energy a person spends walking by nearly a sixth, surpassing most hip-assistive exoskeletons, according to a study detailing the device published 10 July in the journal Science Advances . Companies and res…

In barely a decade, the continuous glucose monitor has turned real-time blood sugar into a number that millions track on their phones. The small round patch on the back of the arm is everywhere now—on diabetics, athletes, biohackers, and the simply curious. And for people with diabetes , it has revolutionized management of their disease. Now a startup called Adaptyx Biosciences has taken a major …

For more than a decade, artificial intelligence has been touted as a way to dramatically accelerate drug discovery . Yet despite billions of dollars in investment, relatively few AI-designed medicines have made it to patients. That’s partially because the timelines for careful drug testing can’t be easily compressed—and partially because drug development is just really hard. Isomorphic Labs , the…

With the reliability of a quality wristwatch, pacemakers send out electric pulses to keep your heart beating at a steady rate. But unlike a watch, when the batteries need replacement, it’s a surgical affair—one that can be required as often as every five years . While the risks of having a pacemaker implanted are low, going under the knife always creates the potential for complications. A group o…

As the deadly Bundibugyo strain of Ebola continues to ravage parts of Central Africa, physicians once again find themselves scrambling for ways to keep the sickest patients alive. Existing antibody treatments are strain-specific and don’t target the virus responsible for the current outbreak, leaving few therapies capable of clearing virus from the bloodstream. This forces doctors to rely largely…

This is the place where you face yourself, the you that could be you with a few different parts, a pump for your heart, eyes off color, and fresh off the shelf fake hair (a bit obvious), skin smoothed. You’re not perfect, but it’s a good start. Down to small digits, you’ll be improved. Memory maintained by small motors, as long as these gizmos don’t glitch. What’s before you? Full replacement or …

It can be difficult to carry on conversation in a crowded public setting, and even more so with any degree of hearing loss. But what if you could amplify only the person you wanted to hear and suppress the rest ? What if a computer could do that automatically by reading your brain? When we focus on a particular person talking, we subconsciously track the gradual modulations in speech volume, whic…

Patients who use mobile applications to manage medical conditions including depression and chronic pain might assume the apps have been evaluated by regulatory agencies to be safe and effective. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Most of the more than 55,000 medical apps that claim to diagnose or treat a condition—or ones that provide clinical decision support, known as “therapeutic” apps—have …

One of the earliest stated goals for computing in medicine was to aid in clinical reasoning: the decision-making steps required to reach a diagnosis and form a treatment plan. And over the years, researchers have built many clinical decision support systems, which have typically been purpose-built, with painstakingly written rules about symptoms, test thresholds, and medication interactions. As a…

Millions of people worldwide are turning to chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude, and a proliferating class of specialized AI companionship apps for friendship, therapy, or even romance. While some users report psychological benefits from these simulated relationships, research has also shown the relationships can reinforce or amplify delusions, particularly among users already vulnerable to psychosis…

I first met Robert Woo in 2011, during his third time walking in a powered exoskeleton . The architect had been paralyzed in a construction accident four years earlier, but he was determined to get back on his feet. Watching him clunk across a rehab room in an exoskeleton prototype, the technology felt astonishing. I had the same reaction when reporting on early brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), …

By some estimates, more than a trillion dollars have already been invested in artificial intelligence. But large tech companies , including Meta and OpenAI, are still not content with today’s AI; they say they’ve set their sights on powerful, versatile AI that by some measure would match or even exceed human performance. A remarkable amount of resources is being poured into developing artificial …

What if biology stopped being something we study and started becoming something we design? That’s the premise of Adrian Woolfson ’s new book, On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence , which published on 28 April from MIT Press . He argues that advances in AI and DNA synthesis are pushing biology toward an engineering paradigm—one in which scientists…

This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering . The traditional approach to academic research goes something like this: Assemble experts from a discipline, put them in a building, and hope something useful emerges. Biology departments do biology. Engineering departments do engineering. Medical schools treat patients. NYU is turning that model inside out. At its new …

Scott Imbrie vividly remembers the first time he used a robotic arm to shake someone’s hand and felt the robotic limb as if it were his own. “I still get goosebumps when I think about that initial contact,” he says. “It’s just unexplainable.” The moment came courtesy of a brain implant: an array of electrodes that let him control a robotic arm and receive tactile sensations back to the brain. Get…

Identifying bacteria by sight can be quite difficult. Why not listen to them instead? Researchers at TU Delft in the Netherlands and the university’s spinoff company SoundCell think that bacterial infections could be diagnosed with sound. They’ve crafted a nanoscale drum kit that uses some of the world’s smallest percussion instruments to turn a bacterium’s motions into song . Previously, the Del…