Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body

Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body, United States Patent 6754472, by Microsoft 2004.

Abstract
Methods and apparatus for distributing power and data to devices coupled to the human body are described. The human body is used as a conductive medium, e.g., a bus, over which power and/or data is distributed. Power is distributed by coupling a power source to the human body via a first set of electrodes. One or more devise to be powered, e.g., peripheral devices, are also coupled to the human body via additional sets of electrodes. The devices may be, e.g., a speaker, display, watch, keyboard, etc. A pulsed DC signal or AC signal may be used as the power source. By using multiple power supply signals of differing frequencies, different devices can be selectively powered. Digital data and/or other information signals, e.g., audio signals, can be modulated on the power signal using frequency and/or amplitude modulation techniques.

Patent available online

This patent grant the company "exclusive rights to the body’s ability to act as a computer network" via David Adam, “Computerising the Body: Microsoft Wins Patent to Exploit Network Potential of Skin, ”The Guardian, July 6,2004, 3; David Concar, “The Boldest Cut, ”New Scientist, May 29, 2004, 32-37.

Augmenting our collective IQ

Augmenting our collective IQ by Doug Engelbart, invited by MIT.

Abstract
Throughout human history, new artifacts and the training and culture associated with them have served to augment human capabilities. In recent years, the computer and Web have played a central role in the enhancement of human capabilities. This discussion will explore what we can do next to facilitate the human and tool co-evolution to augment our collective capability to serve humankind.

Speaker bio
Doug Engelbart is the inventor of the computer mouse and led research teams at Stanford Research Institute that developed hypertext, networked computing, and early graphical user interfaces. At the 1968 Fall Computer Conference in San Francisco, he presented what became known as the mother of all demos. For a Wired article on this demo, see http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/mouse_pr.html. Engelbart is a recipient of the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Turing Award, and the 2000 National Medal of Technology.

Also available online, mp3 of "Collective IQ and Human Augmentation", Interview with Douglas Engelbart, April 4, 2007.

Douglas Engelbart's definition of augmentation: "everything we have done to increase our capabilities (...) from the tool to clothing".

Machine Therapy

I mentioned the work of Kelly Dobson about a year ago. Today, I attended her VERY inspiring thesis defense at the Media Lab, researching on Machine Therapy. I love her personal relationship to machines. I cannot wait to read her thesis!


Abstract
In this thesis I describe a new body of work called Machine Therapy, a methodology for revealing the vital relevance of subconscious elements of human-machine interactions that works within art, design, psychodynamics, and engineering. This practice highlights what machines actually do and mean, in contrast to what their designers consciously intended. Machine Therapy is a cyclical process that alternates between discussion of and sessions for empathic relationships with domestic appliances, personal extension and connection via wearable and prosthetic apparatuses, and the design of evocative visceral robots that interact with people's understandings of themselves and each other. Combining research and practice in digital signal processing and machine learning, mechanical engineering, and textile sensor design, I have been able to create new objects and relationships that are unique in some aspects while maintaining quotidian familiarity in other aspects. This is illustrated through the documented construction of several projects including re-appropriated domestic devices, wearable apparatuses, and machines that act in relation with users’ autonomic signals. These Machine Therapy devices are evaluated in studies of participants' interactive engagements with the machines as well as participants' affective responses to the machines. The Machine Therapy projects facilitate unusual explorations of the parapraxis of machine design and use: these usually unconscious elements of our interactions with machines critically affect our sense of self, agency in the social and political world, and shared emotional, cultural, and perceptual development.


Dissertation Committee

Christopher Csikszentmihályi
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Muriel Cooper Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Program in Media Arts and Sciences
MIT Media Laboratory


Rosalind W. Picard
Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Program in Media Arts and Sciences
MIT Media Laboratory


Edith Ackermann, PhD
Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology
University of Aix-Marseille I, France
Visiting Scientist, MIT School of Architecture

Kelly's Web site
Computing Culture research group

Music performance: water walk

In 1960 John Cage appears in a popular TV show and performs the music piece water walk. He uses sounds of everyday objects to compose. His carefulness and very precise actions show that he must have rehearsed hundred of times to perform his piece. Via multimedialab.

Video


Recently, Nicholas Knouf created an interactive version of John Cage's graphical score Variations 2, called Variations 10b. I tried it during an exhibition at the Lewis Music Library at MIT and found the interface very convincing. The interface allows a performer to change the score and get immediate feedback as to the result. Nicholas hopes that both listeners and performers will develop a more nuanced understanding of the score through the use of the interface.

Paper on variations 10b.


Three dots activated in a performance

What's next with social networks?

I recently thought of creating a social network for dead people. Everyone could provide their digital representations, biometry information, simulation of personal touch that would only be revealed when dead. However, Mission Eternity is a similar concept that Regine Debatty noticed at ISEA.

The M∞ ARCANUM CAPSULES contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem: as infinite data particles they forever circulate the global info sphere – hosted in the shared memory of thousands of networked computers and mobile devices of M∞ ANGELS, people who contribute a part of their digital storage capacity to the mission.

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Arcanum Capsules contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem.

Almost Safe

Deconstruction, 2007; Low Tide, 2007 by Anthony Goicolea

In his new show "Almost Safe," photographer Anthony Goicolea presents digitally-composed, black-and-white images of a shattered earth. The artist portrays a world that bears the wounds of globalization, war, and a crippled environment. Only these wastelands are left in their wake. Goicolea has composited images taken at several disaster sites, adding elements (like power lines across an ocean rock formation) that seem out-of-place or just barely plausible. In Deconstruction, ominous dark clouds form over an office building that's been halved in two and thrown across a beach. In Black Ice, a car is shown leaving a post-apocalyptic cityscape that's maybe part-New York City and part-Oz. This world is only half-real, but the more you look at Goicolea's constructions, the less impossible they seem. - Christopher Bartley

"Almost Safe" opens April 28 and runs through June 2, 2007 at Postmasters Gallery, NYC.
More info

Via V magazine

We Will Become Silhouettes

Created by Elena Corchero, we will become silhouettes is a collection of fashion accesories that explores delicate ways of incorporating organic solar cells into textiles in which technology meets tradition. The pieces are charged while used outdoors during the day. When brought indoors in the evening they transform into a decorative ambient light display for the home, powered only by energy stored earlier.
Electronic components like solar cells, resistors, and LEDs are integrated directly into the textile and wired together into working circuits using conductive thread. Organic prints and embroidery motifs recall endangered birds.

Enabling musical expression

Rachel's graphical representation of Dan's musical composition

During the H2.0 event, Adam Boulanger, researcher at the Hyperinstruments group with Professor Tod Machover presented their most impressive latest research: enabling musical expression.
Dan Ellsey, who has cerebral palsy, has been composing with the Hyperscore environment for almost two years. Adam developed a head-set and supporting software so that Dan could expressively perform his hyperscore compositions as a soloist. Dan worked closely with the team to perform his “eagle song” using head movements during the event. Rachel Roppolo worked on translating the sensor inputs from Dan into minimal graphics. Zach Watts worked on the curve algorithm to determine the type of shape Dan was making.
The performance was clearly impressive, very detailed and empowered the public.

I later talked to Adam about the project. He explained that the project necessitated a number of important steps. The team initially built on the commercial head tracker that Dan usually uses. However the commercial tracker was unsuccessful for a performance because it is not fast enough and is not reporting continuous data. Adam had to create a continuous head tracker.
Regarding the design aspects of the system, Adam had to work closely with Dan to come up with the algorithm that he needed to get clean data from Dan’s head movements, the team later calibrated the sensors for Dan.
The other step consisted in designing a controller that could run a performance. The team designed a new software that could take Dan’s range of motions and velocity of movement. They also had to do curve analysis to determine the type of shape Dan was making. Adam had to also figure out, based on his piece and movement, how this would be represented as an expression of the piece. The whole process was a discussion back and forth between Dan and the team. The system being done, they went through the piece of music and defined the type of movement needed for expression.

The performance was incredible. I cried, impressed by what the team had achieved.
The speakers were all impressive, I missed a few of them that I have to catch up on the archive. The webcast of the event is available online.


Adam, Dan and Tod

Inspiring book : the Prosthetic Impulse

The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.

The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human.”
—Bernard Steigler,Technics and Time

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on to him, and they still give him trouble at times. . . . Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginable great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

The first chapter can be downloaded here

A living sculpture

Aimée Mullins

Today at the fantastic H2.0 event hosted by John Hockenberry and organized by the MIT Media Laboratory, key speakers presented new research initiatives for augmenting mental and physical capability and this to vastly improve the quality of human life.


Pictures from Aimee Mullins's talk

I discovered the inspiring work of Aimée Mullins, that not only is functional but also beautiful. She raises questions on identity and the body, on what it means to loose her lower self. She worked with various artists, designers and modeled for Alexander Mc Queen.


Aimée Mullins, Dazed & Confused, September 1998 by photographer Nick Knight

In Cremaster 3, actress Aimée Mullins wears blades on the soles of her shoes or a white dress and transparent crystal legs.


Cremaster 3

At the end of the H2.0 event Aimée Mullins declared: "people say i have no legs, but I have ten pairs of them and my interaction with them allow me to be a living sculpture"


Aimée' Sculptural legs, photographer: Webb Chappell


Model: Aimée Mullins, photographer: Chris Winget

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