Society for Neuroscience - Social Issues round Table

Human Fusions: Ethical and Social Issues Raised by Neural-Digital Interfaces

Chicago, IL, November 2019: Among the 14,000 papers and symposiums at the conference, this session was chosen as one of only forty to be featured in a press conference. The session featured seven members of Human Fusions.

You can watch videos of the session here.

• Dustin Tyler (Session Chair), Case Western Res Univ
• Douglas Weber, Univ Pittsburgh
• Brandon Prestwood
• Nick Zingale, Cleveland State Univ
• David Hodge, Tuskegee Univ
• Emma-Jane Alexander, Univ of Wyoming
• Sue Rivera, Case Western Res Univ

January 30th, 2020

Cleveland Premier followed by a panel discussion with

A professional film explores the connection between humans and technology for Human Health (one of the three pillars of HFi). The film debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It will have its Cleveland premiere on Jan 30, 2020 at the Playhouse Center. (See trailer below or here.) The showing will be followed by a panel discussion of the researchers featured in the film.

• Bolu Ajiboye, Ph.D.
• Robert Kirch, Ph.D.
• Jonathan Miller, M.D.
• Dustin Tyler, Ph.D.

We hope that many of you can join us at this event and promote the Human Fusions Institute. Get your tickets here.

NeuroReality goes Live for all

NeuroReality is the new future enabled by HFi. Our subjects have had and demonstrated the value of NeuroReality for more than seven years. This year, HFi created the first prototype NR system that anyone can try. Look for opportunities to demo this first-of-its-kind system in 2020.

Team: Michael Fu, Emily Graczyk, Chris Zorman, Luis Mesias Flores, and Leah Roldan

Removing War fighter from Danger

The most dangerous job in the military is being an Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialist. As if the danger of a single mistake potentially maiming or killing is not enough, these highly trained specialists are working in hostile environments and being shot at while doing their job. We envision a symbiotic relationship between the specialist and the robot to remove them physically from danger, but still bring their skills directly to the theater. Let's move upstream from creating solutions to amputation and rather prevent the injury causing amputation in the first place.

Team: Dustin Tyler, Bob Michaels, Leah Roldan

Being a Swarm?!

DARPA OFFSET Seed Sprint: How do a swarm and team of humans work effectively together? This is the question and goal of the DARPA OFFSET program. The answer, of course, is to build intelligent swarms with a symbiotic human-in-the-loop design. The program was a six-month "sprint" in 2019 that culminated with a demo at DARPA's "FX3" last month. The Case/UT-Austin team lead by Michael Fu and Kiju Lee impressed the reviewers and we await the next steps for integration with the larger OFFSET program.

Team: Kiju Lee and Michael Fu (PIs), Wyatt Newman, Thomas Shkurti, Leah Roldan, Emily Graczyk, Ammar Nahari, Chuanqi Zheng, Chen Zhao, Dustin Tyler

Being an Inspiration

The following is a copy of an email message received from a person that was sitting next to one of the participants in an HFi study. It is a reminder of the importance of the work in HFi. Remember that at the core, our work is about connection and bettering the human experience. The influence of our work extends further than we might even know.

Dear Dr. Tyler: I'm a postdoc in infectious diseases but was recently fortunate enough to sit next to one of the individuals participating in your research on a flight from Cleveland. He was a left forearm amputee and we had the most fantastic discussion about the research he's participating in. He showed me a number of the videos from your lab and expressed how the work has significantly changed his life. I was recently in a terrible accident and while my orthopedic surgeon was able to save my leg using intramedullary rods, plates, and screws, there was a significant period of time where I was in danger of becoming a lower-limb amputee; stories such as his resonate very personally with me.

It was truly an inspirational conversation and I just thought, as a PI, you'd be proud to know how life-changing the work and the people coming from your lab are--even to individuals not directly related to your field of expertise. This man also told me how the student working with him (the one who "pushed the button" for the first time on his sensory hand) recently defended [note: this is Ivana Cuberovic, who just finished her Ph.D. in May 2019] and how impactful and emotional that was for him. I'll admit this story brought me to tears and would like to extend my congratulations to them as well--that the research community across genres is so proud of their contributions to science and so fortunate to share a platform with them.

​Thanks again for the phenomenal work your group is doing and being an inspiration to us all. Maybe one day while visiting Cleveland I could stop by and see it all in action!

Sincerely, K.H.

Going Fully Inside

It has been a long and exciting four years since the start of the DARPA HAPTIX project and the vision of the fully-implanted iSens™. Basically, the goal was to press a button on your phone and then be connected directly to a prosthesis, in real time, such that the robot becomes part of one's self. This is the launching project for the HFi. As a holiday present for 2019, all the final testing for the iSens system was completed and it passed "with flying colors." The IDE application should be headed to the FDA first or second week of the new year. Depending on FDA response, we hope to deploy in 2020. This project will end its DARPA support in early 2021, but we have already secured funding from the Veteran's Administration to start in April 2020 to continue a four-year randomized-clinical trial with this device.

Team: MANY! The team has spanned several academic and industrial partners. There have been more the 40 people that have worked on this project in various capacities. Key partners have included Case Western Reserve Univ (project parent site), Medtronic, Providence VAMC, OrthoCarolina, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Ardiem Medical, University of Chicago, Univ of CA - San Francisco, and several sub-contractors and science partners.