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The Open Prosthetics Project is an open source project dedicated to the sharing and dissemination of knowledge on the construction of artificial limbs. This Wired article by Quinn Norton summarizes it nicely.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, electronics, open source, pcomp, physical computing

Neuroscientists in Montreal, Denmark, and the US have developed a Braille-like tongue display of 144 pixels, that stimulates the visual areas of the brain through the tongue. Interesting, but can you talk and read at the same time? It may be impractical now, but it’s an interesting approach to the problem of providing vision replacement or augmentation through technology.

More details can be found at this link.

Thanks to Howard Rheingold’s Smart mobs blog for the links.

Technorati Tags: electronics, displays, sensors

Rosalind Picard’s affective computing research group at MIT is a good place to go if you’re interested in any kind of physiological sensing. They’re also doing some interesting thinking about how physical state reflects human affect.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, design, sensors

From their mission statement:

“ThinkCycle is an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting distributed collaboration towards design challenges facing underserved communities and the environment. ThinkCycle seeks to create a culture of open source design innovation, with ongoing collaboration among individuals, communities and organizations around the world.

“ThinkCycle provides a shared online space for designers, engineers, domain experts and stakeholders to discuss, exchange and construct ideas towards sustainable design solutions in critical problem domains.”

Good stuff, well worth browsing through.

Technorati Tags: design, open source