Daily Archives: June 10, 2017

The Department of Defenses strategic plan calls for the Joint Force to conduct humanitarian, disaster relief, and related operations. Some disasters, due to grave risks to the health and wellbeing of rescue and aid workers, prove too great in scale or scope for timely and effective human response. The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) seeks to address this problem by promoting innovation in human-supervised robotic technology for disaster-response operations.

The primary technical goal of the DRC is to develop human-supervised ground robots capable of executing complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments. Competitors in the DRC are developing robots that can utilize standard tools and equipment commonly available in human environments, ranging from hand tools to vehicles.

To achieve its goal, the DRC is advancing the state of the art of supervised autonomy, mounted and dismounted mobility, and platform dexterity, strength, and endurance. Improvements in supervised autonomy, in particular, aim to enable better control of robots by non-expert supervisors and allow effective operation despite degraded communications (low bandwidth, high latency, intermittent connection).

The DRC program website (http://archive.darpa.mil/roboticschallenge/) provides program highlights, including the DRC Trials held in December 2013 and the DRC Finals in June 2015.

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DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC)

Ashley Barnes was 35 years old when doctors told her she would never walk again.

A botched spinal procedure in 2014 paralyzed her from the waist down. The Tyler, Tex., resident had been an avid runner, clocking six miles daily when not home with her then-9-year-old autistic son, whom she raised alone. Life in a wheelchair was not an option.

I needed to be the best mom I could be, Barnes said. I needed to be up and moving.

So she threw herself into physical therapy, convinced she would one day run again. Soon she realized that wasnt a reality.

Although she wore a brave face, I would save my moments of crying for my room, she said.

About a year later, hope resurfaced when she learned of the ReWalk system, a battery-powered robotic exoskeleton that attaches to the legs and lower back. It contains motors at the knee and hip joints and sensors to help it adjust with each footfall. While wearing the device and holding two forearm crutches, someone with complete lower-limb paralysis can walk.

Rehabilitation centers often employ such devices in physical therapy, which is how Barnes first encountered one at the Baylor Tom Landry Center, a rehab clinic in Dallas. After seven months without being able to stand, she did. Then she took a step as she began to learn how to walk again.

In 2014, the ReWalk system became the first personal robotic exoskeleton approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The following year, the Department of Veterans Affairs agreed to cover the exoskeletons for qualifying vets. Meanwhile, several companies began touting similar devices. For example, Ekso makes units used to rehabilitate people after spinal cord injury or stroke.

Health insurers, however, generally dont cover the expensive equipment.

After working with the ReWalk system at her rehab center, Barnes,who uses a wheelchair at home to get around, decided she wanted one of her own. But Tricare, her insurer, denied the request.

In a statement, Tricare said it does not cover these devices for use on a personal basis due to concerns with their safety and efficacy. This is particularly important due to the vulnerability of paralyzed users in the event of a fall.

Two years and countless nos later, Barnes still doesnt have one because, according to Tricare, it isnt medically necessary.

Barnes strongly disagrees.

This is medically necessary, she said. If she had one of the devices, Id be able to go to the bathroom. I would be able to walk around, exercise in it. I would love to be able to stand up and cook things in my microwave or on my stove.

She paused before adding, I would no longer have to look up at my son.

High prices, low incomes

The ReWalk Personal 6.0 System costs, on average, $81,000. Ottobocks C-Brace is priced at $75,000. For the Indego Personal, which received FDA approval last year, it is $98,000.

About 28 percent of the more than 5.2 million Americans living with paralysis survive on an annual household income of less than $15,000, according to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. The basic expenses of living with paraplegia are, on average, $519,520 in the first year and $68,821 each subsequent year, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center. Furthermore, only 34.3 percent of people are employed 20 years after a paralysis-causing injury.

To date, ReWalk has sold only 118 personal devices in the United States.

Some people do get devices covered by insurance, but it can be an onerous process, as evidenced by Mark Delamere Jr. The Boston native, 19, was paralyzed in a car accident in 2013, on the third day of his freshman year of high school.

Like Barnes, he thought he would never walk again. Like Barnes, with the help of a robotic exoskeleton, he did. Unlike Barnes, though, he has an exoskeleton at home.

But for two of his teenage years, he sat in a wheelchair while his family filed claims and appealed denials.

They dont really classify these things with the purpose of you getting better, because they think the injury is never going to change, his father, Mark Sr., said.

Eventually, though, Mark Jr. got approved by his insurance company and received the ReWalk, which he uses for at-home therapy and just to walk around the house and the neighborhood, up and down the street. Asked to describe the feeling, he was at a loss for words.

Its kind of crazy, he said. It just feels kind of I dont really know. It feels so different.

They dont always work

But his story is rare. People are paying out of pocket or fundraising for exoskeletons, said Dan Kara, research director for robotics at ABI Research, a technology analysis and consultant company.

The price of the devices exceeds their value in the eyes of insurers, which want to be able to prove they actually improve quality of life and utility, said Howard Forman, a Yale professor of diagnostic radiology and public health. Utility means that an exoskeleton would provide a medical benefit beyond simply helping people move around and complete daily tasks.

Virginia Tech researchers found that these devices, by getting otherwise immobilized people to move around, can help them manage spasticity a continuous contraction of muscles, which can be quite painful and improve bowel function. Barnes said when she was training with the exoskeleton, tending to her bowels took about 20 minutes each day, not the customary hour.

One major concern is how relatively untested the technology is outside the controlled environment of a rehabilitation facility. Indeed, they dont always work as planned.

Stacey Kozal, a 42-year-old Ohio resident, was paralyzed from the waist down after what she said was a devastating flare-up of lupus. For more than a year, she fought with her insurance provider, Anthem, in hopes of obtaining Ottobock C-Braces. These devices have bendable knee joints equipped with sensors that measure the current position of the joint every .02 seconds, according to Ottobocks website. A built-in microprocessor adjusts ankle pressure while a hydraulic system moves the knee to help the user place her foot down in the right place.

Eventually, Anthem agreed to cover a C-Brace for each leg, which Kozal used to hike the Appalachian Trail, where limitations revealed themselves. The battery required constant recharging. Rain was problematic because the C-Brace isnt waterproof.

While she plans to wear her C-Braces around the house, shes now hiking the Pacific Crest Trail using old-fashioned braces that lock her legs in place. She uses her core, hips and upper body to swing her legs forward, and she keeps her balance with the aid of forearm crutches. C-Braces are heavier than traditional devices, so when their batteries died on the Appalachian Trail, they made it more difficult for her to move around.

Another major issue for insurers, though, is the price. But Forman said, Though these technologies are incredibly expensive now, we have all kinds of evidence that eventually ... they can become affordable to anyone.

Indeed, some entrepreneurs are working on cheaper solutions. Silicon Valley start-up SuitX created a lightweight model called the Phoenix. While most exoskeletons have motors powering each joint, the Phoenix simply uses two hip motors. Even so, if approved by the FDA, the device would cost $40,000, according to SuitX.

The rehabilitation marketplace is limited by the number of people who have these conditions, Kara said. The exoskeletons are basically handcrafted, which is expensive. If you could up the volume, you could lower the price.

The key would be expanding the user base. One way to do that, he noted, is to sell the devices for purposes other than rehabilitation. Warehouse workers might wear them to assist with lifting heavy loads. Some companies are already testing this idea: Lowes, for example, recently outfitted several of employees with exoskeletons as part of a pilot program.

The worldwide market for exoskeletons $97 million now is expected to grow to $1.9 billion by 2025, according to ABI Research.

Kara compared the prospects for exoskeletons to the growth of LiDAR, which uses pulsed lasers to record topographic features. For years, researchers used LiDAR to create 3-D maps of the Earth, but it was expensive. However, the rise of self-driving cars, which use the technology to navigate roadways, fostered improvements in the technology. As a result, Kara said, the price of LiDAR systems has begun to fall and is expected to drop dramatically, from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars or less.

[A new way to find out what lies beneath]

Waiting for exoskeleton prices to drop is tremendously frustrating, Barnes said. We take so much for granted when we dont have physical problems, she said. Like just being able to reach up and grab something in my laundry cabinet without having to break my neck to get it.

She isnt ready to just accept that she and others who will face these issues might never get a sense of greater normalcy.

My biggest reason for standing up tall to them is I want to do it for all those behind me, she said. The more it gets approved, the more it cant get denied.

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Robotics are helping paralyzed people walk again, but the price tag ... - Washington Post

Technology 0Updated at 9:16 am, June 10th, 2017 By: Stephan Rockefeller, EastIdahoNews.com We Matched

Stephan Rockefeller | EastIdahoNews.com

IDAHO FALLS Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center unveiled its new fully integrated surgical robotics suite Friday, the first facility of its kind in the state.

The 800-square-foot operating suite includes EIRMCs Da Vinci Surgical Robot System and a new fully loaded high-depth laparoscopic video system.

Laparoscopic surgery, often referred to as minimally invasive surgery, is a procedure with the assistance of a video camera and several thin instruments. During the surgical procedure, small incisions of up to half an inch are made and plastic tubes, called ports, are placed through the incisions.

The camera and the instruments are then introduced through the ports, which allow access to the inside of the patient.

Stephan Rockefeller | EastIdahoNews.com

The video camera becomes a surgeons eyes in laparoscopy surgery since the surgeon uses the image from the video camera positioned inside the patients body to perform the procedure.

The surgical suite is the only one of its kind in Idaho and puts EIRMC at the forefront of robotic and laparoscopic surgery, hospital officials said.

These tools give EIRMC patients the opportunity to undergo surgeries with lower recovery times and fewer post-surgical complications.

We had the Da Vinci technology, but we didnt have it in a room this size, Admin Director Barry Hawthorne said during Fridays open house. A lot of (hospitals) have the Da Vinci, but what they dont have is the full integration of all the video and laparoscopy.

The surgical room was designed to house all the electronic equipment that supports the surgical robot and the redundant video systems. The majority of electrical and communication cables are run within the walls, eliminating trip and contamination hazards.

With less equipment out, the turnover time is drastically shorter between surgeries. Hospital employees can scrub the room and decontaminate in 15 to 20 minutes.

It can also function as a trauma surgery room.

Multiple monitors adorn the walls of the surgical suite, allowing support staff to see the same view that the surgeon sees while operating the Da Vinci robot.

Jessica Clements | EIRMC Marketing & Community Relations Specialist

This is a part of a bigger expansion of our laparoscopy and video technology throughout all of our operation rooms, and this is just the first one, Hawthorne said.

The state-of-the art operation room housed its first surgery May 30 and has housed between 15 to 20 since.

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EIRMC boast Idaho's first fully integrated surgical robotics suite - East Idaho News

TOKYO SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T) said it would buy two firms that build walking robots from Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), adding to the Japanese company's growing artificial intelligence portfolio.

SoftBank said it would buy Boston Dynamics and Tokyo-based Schaft, which design and manufacture robots that simulate human movement, but did not disclose the terms of the transactions.

Shares of the company rose as much as 7.9 percent after the deal was announced, hitting a 17-year high.

"Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the information revolution, and Marc (Raibert) and his team at Boston Dynamics are the clear technology leaders in advanced dynamic robots," SoftBank Group Chairman Masayoshi Son said in a statement on Friday.

Raibert is CEO and founder of Boston Dynamics.

SoftBank has embarked on an aggressive acquisition campaign to boost its research and development capabilities. The group is backing the $93 billion Vision Fund, the world's largest private equity fund that seeks to invest in technologies expected to grow significantly in the near future, such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

Son, Japan's richest man, describes the fund as essential for setting up SoftBank for a data "gold rush" which he expects to happen as the global economy becomes increasingly digitized.

Boston Dynamics and Schaft could eventually be vested with the Vision Fund, a person familiar with the deal told Reuters

Schaft, a University of Tokyo spinoff, develops bipedal robots designed to negotiate uneven terrain.

"Robotics as a field has great potential, and we're happy to see Boston Dynamics and Schaft join the SoftBank team to continue contributing to the next generation of robotics," an Alphabet spokesperson said.

Boston Dynamics has produced a number of robots that mimic human and animal movement, including Atlas, a humanoid model that co-ordinates motion and balance using its arms and legs and can pick itself up off the ground when knocked over.

It is best known for building robots that look as if they belong in science-fiction movies and are often co-developed or funded by the U.S. military. Its military projects would mean the acquisition is likely to be subject to regulatory approval from Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

The company was acquired by Google in 2013 during a robotics shopping spree led by Android creator Andy Rubin, but the team struggled to find its place within the tech giant after Rubin's departure, former Boston Dynamics employees said.

"They're advancing the state of the art in independent robotics. They are probably the leader in the U.S.," said Arnis Mangolds, a robotics expert who has worked with Boston Dynamics.

"But the problem is it's not ready for prime time, and very few people have a tolerance for that."

(Reporting by Julia Love in SAN FRANCISCO and Makiko Yamazaki in TOKYO, Writing by Sam Holmes in SINGAPORE; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Himani Sarkar)

BRUSSELS EU antitrust authorities opened an investigation on Friday into Qualcomm's $38-billion bid for NXP Semiconductors , ratcheting up pressure on the U.S. smartphone chipmaker to offer concessions to address their concerns.

HONG KONG Asia's competitiveness in fintech is being undermined by the rivalry among the region's financial centers that has created regulatory complexity and uncertainty, a financial lobby group has warned.

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SoftBank unit buys robotics businesses from Alphabet Inc - Reuters