MYO Wearable-Computing Armbands have potential for Amputees and Disabled

"Wave goodbye to camera-based gesture control." That is the confident directive coming from a one-year-old Waterloo, Ontario, startup called Thalmic Labs.

The company is prepared to ship its next batch of wearable-computing armbands for device controls early next year.

The $149 armbands called MYO do not require cameras in order to track hand or arm movements. The armbands can wirelessly control and interact with computers and other digital consumer products by recognizing the electric impulses in users' muscles.

The MYO is worn around the forearm; its purpose is to control computers, phones, and other devices, sending the data via Bluetooth. Windows and Mac operating systems are supported and APIs will be available for iOS and Android.

Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (BLE) is used for the MYO to communicate with the paired devices. (Bluetooth version 4.0 is the most recent version of Bluetooth wireless technology.

It includes a low-energy feature promoted as good news for developers and manufacturers of Bluetooth devices and applications—enabling markets for devices that are low-cost and operate with low-power wireless connectivity.)

The MYO specs include on-board, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and an ARM processor. Also part of the mix are the company's proprietary muscle-activity sensors and a six-axis inertial measurement unit.

A user's gestures and movements are actually detected in two ways: muscle activity and motion sensing. The Thalmic team says that when sensing the muscle movements of the user, the MYO can detect changes down to each individual finger.

Also, when tracking arm and hand positions, the MYO picks up subtle movements and rotations in all directions.

Right now, as indicated in their newly released video of the company, Thalmic Labs hopes for greater things for MYO via a developer community. They expect an official developer program to be up and running in the next few months.

They pride themselves in groundbreaking technology, as a team with specialties from electrical engineering to embedded system design. Nonetheless, they are looking to developers for innovative ideas in applications.

Disabled Gamers - The eyes have it!

Engineers said Friday they had built a device using mass-produced video gaming equipment that lets disabled people control a computer with just their eyes -- with a price tag of under $30 (25 euros).

The gadget comprises two video game console cameras, costing less than $10 apiece, attached outside the line of vision to a pair of ordinary glasses, reported the team from Imperial College London.

The cameras relay the eye's movements to an ordinary computer, wirelessly over Wi-Fi or via USB, and used one watt of power, they wrote in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

In this way, test subjects could control a cursor on a screen just like a computer mouse.

"We have achieved two things: we have built a 3D eye tracking system hundreds of times cheaper than commercial systems and used it to build a real-time brain machine interface," said co-author Aldo Faisal.

"This is frugal innovation; developing smarter software and piggy-backing existing hardware to create devices that can help people worldwide..."

It also allowed patients to interact more smoothly and more quickly than technologies that require electrode implants in the brain, and are even more expensive.

"We demonstrate here that by using mass-produced video game hardware, it is possible to produce an ultra-low cost binocular eye-tracker with comparable performance to commercial systems, yet 800 times cheaper," the researchers wrote.

The technology offers hope for restoring some level of independence to people suffering from multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, muscular dystrophy and spinal cord injuries or amputees.

In the EU alone, there were more than 16 million people with disabilities who would benefit from such a system, said the scientists.

Other low-cost eye-tracking systems developed in the past had much lower performance, they added, while commercial-grade systems mainly used in research cost more than $20,000.

To demonstrate their gadget's functionality, the team got subjects to play the video game Pong -- using their eyes to bat a ball bouncing around on a computer screen.

Six of the subjects who had never done this before, achieved a "respectable score", said Faisal.

A video of someone playing Pong using device can be watched here:

The researchers said they solved the problem of involuntary blinking in controlling the computer.

Many systems use a blink to represent a mouse click, but the team calibrated their system to work on a single-eyed wink instead.

They were also able to calibrate how far into the distance their subjects were looking, holding promise for future applications that may allow people to control an electronic wheelchair simply by looking at where they want to go.

Faisal said the team was looking for a funding partner "that embraces our low-cost approach" to make the device commercially available, and had filed for a patent.