Early mornings, who loves them? Dogs, and that’s about it. But with LED lights embedded, the LUMI eye mask – or sleep mask, depending on which side of that word debate you’re on – is meant to slowly ease you into the pain of waking up at 5 A.M, making your biological clock believe it isn’t living a nightmare.

Those pesky LED lights start emitting photons disguised as sunlight half an hour before your desired wake-up time. As a result, you wake up more naturally and less grumpily.

Being a sleep mask, it also acts to block any unwanted external light during your night-time sleep, letting you complete your deep sleep cycles.

‘Our bodies are designed to sleep in darkness and wake with sunlight. Darkness triggers our brain to produce something called melatonin, which helps us fall asleep. But any tiny amount of light disrupts this,’ says designed Taylor Hide, who’s only 22.

Most happy about the LUMI might be those who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and whose symptoms might be lessened by the mask.

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Berkley Bionics made the HULC exoskeleton back in 2008, and with what seems like a doubling of their efforts, the newly announced eLEGS is an evolved, complex and usable exoskeleton for day to day use.

It was built to allow paraplegics to stand up and walk , simple as that. Described as a “wearable, artificially intelligent, bionic device”, it will go through an initial phase where it will only be used in rehabilitation centers, and will then be released for use anywhere in the world. It largely fits most people up to 220 pounds, and between 5’2” and 6’4”, operates quietly, with speed up to 2MPH and enough knee flexion to allow someone to comfortably sit down and get up.

Its inner brain approximates the user’s intentions by looking at countless minute gestures through a large array of sensors. The battery packs are lithium-ion and are good for six hours of walking. Made of steel and carbon fiber, it weight 45 pounds and will be available sometime in 2011 for $100,000 – with a commercial version following in 2013.

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The problem so far with sensor gloves for translating American Sign Language has been that they only interpret letters, which are signed by quick finger gestures – whereas sign language also has more complex gestures for words and meaning.

A team project started by Kendall Lowrey and other students from Carnegie Mellon University means to fix that problem, and also connect the glove to a voicebox shield for on-the-spot verbalization of the translated signs.

It uses flex sensors for the fingers, and an accelerometer in an attempt to interpret arm gestures. There’s also a tiny LCD, an even tinier speaker, a bunch of wires and inputs (belonging mostly to an Arduino Mega), and a lot of maths and audio filters goings on.

Currently the prototype glove can only recognize the full alphabet and about ten words, but if it can do that, it can also be expanded to do a whole lot more.

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The XOS 2,  successor to the first generation combat Exoskeleton, moves faster, packs lighter, can sustain more damage and consumes a lot less energy than its predecessor.

Dr. Fraser M Smith, Vice President of Raytheon, the company behind the Exoskeleton, says that the XOS 2 is all about lowering power consumption and using energy more efficiently.

A recent public demo had Iron Man 2 actor Clark Gregg wearing the suit and trying out its abilities. The footage sees him and a second, anonymous XOS 2 wearer, punching through wooden boards, lifting 200 pound weights repeatedly, and even punching a boxing bag.

It all looks effortless and quite graceful. Gregg is able to speak and gesture without any signs of being inhibited by the suit. Actions like kicking a soccer ball and going up stairs are also said to be easy to perform, although not demoed.

The XOS 2 will be deployed within 5 years, with a tethered version seeing action initially, followed by a self powered version. The action itself will be mostly supply oriented, the loading and unloading of goods and ammunition, keeping the back health of soldiers safe with high pressure hydraulics.

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Go high-tech with you golf swing, and never look back. At least that’s the plan of German company Sensosolutions, builders of the Sensogloves – world’s first smart golf club. The fancy mittens come with built-in digital sensors to get a continuous view of the player’s grip and help him build a consistent, smooth and long driving golf swing.

It’s a pretty simple theoretical model, you program the sweat-proof gloves to keep a certain top pressure in mind, and they let you know whenever you’ve squeezed above your allotted limit.

“Every golfer wants to hit the ball far and the natural instinct is to swing harder and faster. But trying to swing with more power causes a death grip, creating tension in the hands, wrists, arms and shoulders. The result is a less than smooth swing and, even worse, tightened muscles. Tight muscles result in slower – not faster – club head speed.”

That was golf training 101 in the words of David Bauer, president of Sensosolutions. With that in mind, the glove comes with 18 setting to choose from. The highest ones are most sensitive and are meant for chipping and putting, while the lower settings are there for training your all-purpose grip.

The Sensogloves cost $89, with replacement gloves coming in at $25.

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This is pretty nuts. The FDA has finally approved surgery for end stage age-related macular degeneration in the form of a eye telescope. Though it’s for one eye only, it can magnify vision 2.2 or 2.7 times, allowing for fine detail (and total Terminator-style zooming…sort of). The other eye remains normal to allow for peripheral vision. If you want the procedure, it’s going to cost you a pretty penny, though — about $15,000.

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I loves me some Under Armour gear.  Recently unveiled is the Under Armour Recharge Energy Suit which is constructed using the patented Under Armour Stretch Material and is designed to reduce swelling, soreness and fatigue.  The suit falls into the UA Heat Gear category just so you know. 

Somehow this suit does all this by applying strategic compressions to help target and stabilize muscles.  The suit also protects you from the sun through 30+ UPF and offers a fly in the crotch area for urine relief.  The Under Armour Recharge Energy Suit will cost $130.  Gimme one!

[via UnCrate]

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It’s a sad fact of life, folks…as we age, our capabilities become somewhat, well, declined.  Our eyesight is less sharp, we don’t taste things near as vibrantly, walking can be a pain–literally and figuratively.  And of course, our hearing goes.

And when our hearing goes down, the volume on our television sets goes UP. Way up, sometimes.

But now we may have the answer to age-induced partial deafness–the TV Ears.

These aren’t just ordinary sound amplifying headsets, these are sound amplifying headsets that focus on the spoken word.  Now the dialogue you hear will be amplified, not the explosion or the car chase scene, so you can turn down the volume but still enjoy your favorite show.

Getting old isn’t easy–just ask someone who already is!–but with technology and a bit of grace, we can at least make it suck less.

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All right, spies in the audience, time for you to get your loadout!  No, we don’t have any exploding pens or nerve gas shoe bladders, and don’t even ask where your laser gun is.  We’ve had some budget cuts, okay?

But what we DO have is a little something from Walyou, the Bionic Ear Headphone.  It amplifies sound so that you can hear tiny sounds from about sixty to a hundred feet out, and louder noises from roughly three hundred feet.

It comes with a stereo headset, a built in monocular (that’s like a small telescope, for one eye) with eight times magnification, a digital sound recorder in case you pick up something you’re going to need later, and even a frequency knob for fine tuning and catching those little sounds you might have missed.

And even the poorest of espionage agencies can afford these in their budgets–they only cost $38.63 apiece, after all.  So grab your headsets and get to snooping!

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We’ve talked about the Argus II once before back in March, so this will be an update.  Seems that a test group of thirty two blind folks got implanted with Argus IIs, got their cameras and set out to see if they could actually see anything.  The early results are actually very promising, with many of the recipients now able to see shapes and lights.

One recipient, an optical scientist turned lawyer named , who had been sightless for thirty years prior to his receiving an Argus II system, went from thirty years sightless to being able to make out a door in front of him.  Sure, the whole system is pretty low-resolution right now, but that’s how these things start out.  Got to have a cathode tube system before you can get the 1080p plasma, you know.

The company that makes them, Second Sight Medical Products, is trying to get approval to market the devices, which are slated to cost $100,000 each.  Here’s the interesting question: will any insurance plan cover this?

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Well, that’s it for me, folks–my science fiction lobe has officially collapsed on me, because I was just reading about a new military project that’ll probably change the way war is fought forever.

I read about cyborg beetles.

It seems that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA, the guys who started the Internet in the first place) have been working on a kind of “cyborg beetle” that’s been surgically altered and given all sorts of awesome mechanical doodads to engage in fighting and surveillance of the enemy.  They can be controlled remotely by humans in the field, and are actually part of a much larger overall project called HI-MEMS, the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electric Mechanical Systems.  HI-MEMS, if I understood correctly, will yield history’s first-ever truly bionic organism.

The article went on from there about what all they could do, but my head started swimming about the time I pictured wasps jammed full of uranium so they gave poisoned radioactive stings to their targets.

They’re the perfect soldier.  Absolutely expendable.  Kill as many as you please, the colony will hatch a few million more.  Heaven help us when they start carrying explosives.

They’re the perfect assassin.  Can you lock yourself down so effectively that even a spider can’t reach you?  And a cybernetic black widow could definitely take out a target, probably without ever being noticed.

I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified, and right now, I’m trending toward horrified.

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So…how does the thought of computerized contact lenses strike you?

You’re a tougher soul than I am if that didn’t make you blink, but if engineer Babak Parviz has his way, we’ll all be wearing them soon enough, mostly because we’ll WANT to wear them.

Parviz’s incredible contact lenses will provide what’s known as augmented reality, in which “guides” will appear in front of you to tell you where to find things.  Think of it as having Google Maps with you whereever you go, even when you left your Blackberry at home.  It might tell you where you are, where you are in relation to where you want to be, where you SHOULD want to be, and so on from there.

Naturally, a computer that does all this will need a power supply, and they’re working on that too–specifically, solar power or RF power harvesting–though the first time someone suggests bio-electricity, I’m running for the hills.  The thought that my brain energy could power a computer floating on my pupil actually scares me green, and me a sci-fi buff.

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Retro gaming enthusiasts have been clawing at their emotional bedposts ever since word of a current gen Bionic Commando game surfaced.  Officially confirmed not to appear as a demo on the PS3 or PC, the Xbox 360 only multiplayer demo will be available for Gold Members starting tomorrow.  The demo will feature one deathmatch map called “Vertigo” and will support up to 10 players.  When the game ships on May 19th, it will contain 16 multiplayer maps.  Here’s to hoping that Bionic Commando makes the leap to current gen consoles without losing it’s arm in translation.

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The first story, which hit yesterday, is about a 73-year old man (above) who has had a very minute part of his vision recovered.  30 years ago Ron lost his vision due to etinitis pigmentosa.  Now thanks to an American company, Second Sight, he can now make out flashes of colored light and dark.  The eye, which is called Argus II is in fact a tiny camera and video processor mounted to a pair of glasses that sends the captured info to a sensor affixed to Ron’s eye.  He’s is just one of 18 patients taking part in Second Sights experimental bionic eye.

[Gizmodo]

The other story is about an aspiring filmaker who lost one of his eyes in a childhod accident.  Appropriately, dubbed the Eyeborg Project it involves a photographer/engineer, a team of ocularists, inventors and engineering specialists.  Unlike the previous story, the team has no plans to help blind people recover their vision, at least not yet.  In fact, they’ve created a prosthetic eye that features a built-in CMOS sensor that measure just 1.5×1.5mm big.  Built into the cameras is a tiny RF transmitter that wirelessly sends the cameras captured contents to a video recorder placed in a backpack.  The team is currently creating a film documenting their experiencc living with a bionic eye.

[Crave]

Check the video after the ‘leap’

More info here and here.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency finally decided to address this growing issue. In 2005, Dean Kamen, the famed inventor of the Segway, won $18 million in funding to produce a bionic limb. What they’ve conceived is both mind blowing and exciting.

Video and more info after the ‘leap’

Called the Luke Arm, named after Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films (he lost his hand in Empire Strikes Back), is the first bionic upper limb, or arm to offer 18 degrees of freedom. Previous prosthetics only offered a mere 3 degrees of freedom. The arm can be assembled in 4 modular parts to fit all types of amputees (think forearm or hand only). It’s driven by 12 microprocessors and weighs no more then 8lbs. Powered by an onboard lithium ion battery, the Luke Arm can be controlled in a number of ways. The amputee can have the device hard wired into their muscle or nerves, or opt for a foot module. A pad is placed in the user’s shoe, and based on pressure and toe articulation the amputee can control the arm. Obviously this isn’t the ideal choice for those without legs, but a good alternative.

If you’ve ever seen “The Million Dollar Man” then you’re probably pondering the military applications. The current state of the Luke Arm seems to be for practical use only – so no bone crushing power just yet. But, as with a human arm and hand, it’s easy to crush lightweight objects. To avoid the embarrassment of an exploding soda can or paper cup, Kamen’s team installed a tactile feedback sensor in the hand of the Luke Arm. As the individual grips harder a vibration is felt and grows increasingly stronger as their grip tightens

Watching the linked video is amazing. The man displaying the Luke Arm has been an amputee for 26 years. He is able to pick up objects as small as a marble and softly place it on a stacked paper cup. In the video he remarks ‘how he hasn’t been able to do these things in 26 years’ and ‘that his wife will have plenty for him to do’ as soon as he gets one of these.

Currently Deka, Dean Kamen’s research team, is looking for a partner to go into clinical studies. They hope to keep the Luke Arm’s cost to under $100,000.

More here.

Video here.