So I have been harping about 120 year old technologies. The old telephone, the Internet, how they all converge to the IOT platform. I would be reminiscent if I did not talk about the future potential of all of these tools. One of the cutting-edge technologies that is very active in the academia and some established and upcoming start-ups, is augmenting the human sensing and human performance. I did not explain this in the previous slides so let's spend a couple of minutes on this, and I just want to paint the potential of where you could take the sensing and accuration paradigm. So we have five major senses. Hearing, vision, taste, smell and touch. And the fact of the matter is we do not quite understand how all of these things work independently and together, especially at the cortical level, cognitive science in the brain. The rollover brain place in making sense of all of this is still somewhat an enigma. So what if we did crack this? What if we are able to in part some of these capabilities and knowledge to the missions that we can build? Of all the complex interplace of the census, I found that balance is the most puzzling one. So let's take balance as the X factor. It's a very, very complex motor skill that we acquire in the first one to two years of age. Nobody teaches us, we just naturally learn it by ourselves. Then, we go on to display incredible competence for decades after that. This is the New York Giants Dallas Cowboys game in last November, 2014. And Odell Beckham had this real circus-like touchdown, bending backwards. And it's really, really incredible. How do we do these things? And again, around the age of 65 years of old, our balance competence starts to decrease, and you invariably need some assistive device in order to carry on your activities of daily living. ADL is the acronym people use. So that you can prevent falls. It turns out that balance competence is proportional to the risk of falls. The greater competence you have, the lower are the fall risks, and this is well-documented in clinical research. Another factor is gate defenses, as your walking, if suddenly there's longterm changes in your gate patterns. If you detect that, you can detect for risks weeks or months before the fall actually happens. This is one of the hypothesis that we are currently working on. And the cost of falls is $34 billion in 2013, and CDC estimates that it will go to $55 billion in 2020. These are incredible numbers, but the most important message in this that I found was the impact on the quality of life. That is priceless. Once people fall, one in four die within one year, and for the 75% who survive, the quality of life is impacted very, very badly. So where I'm getting with all this is [COUGH] balance. It's such a simple thing that we all take for granted. Is a very, very complex mechanism. Here's the cartoon representation of the balance system. [COUGH] The take away message is how all this complex sensory, multiple sensory systems and multiple activators are interacting with the brain in a very complex processing. So to start with, we have [COUGH] two eyes for 3D imaging of the scene around us. Then, there is something call vestibulo-ocular reflex. That is the combination of the ear's hearing and the vision to stabilize the scene as we move. And the way this is done is, there are five senses in each ear. The three semi-circular canals and saccule and utricle. They tell the brain about the 3D orientation, gravity, and the acceleration. Then, there are multiple joints in the feet, the ankles, knees, and hips and the skin on the feet. These all form proprioceptive sensing. So these three major sensing systems provide information on the actual orientation of us. And in the sensory association cortices, the computing error that the desired orientation that we want, and the actual orientation. And then, we issue motor commands to change the orientation to the muscular skeletal system. The muscular skeletal system changes the orientation ever so slightly, and like deja vu, this cycle starts all over again. There are multiple feed back time constants that are at play here. Diseases of the sensory organs like sight needing to wear glasses, hearing, fatigue in the neuromuscular system, neurodegenerative disorders, parkinson's, alzheimer's, all of these can and do affect our balance. It's not uncommon for people with these disorders, in the hospital, to go for multiple rounds before these things are actually diagnosed and cheated. [COUGH] There are already some devices in the market that actually use de-sensing and actuation, to improve the human performance to augment the loss of sensory or the muscular system. I should have put Google glasses on this. I missed on that, but in the IOT platform our vision is we can build a lot more advanced systems. In some sense, the systems that we can fill, build, are not very far from the science fiction from Hollywood and the common literature. All you need to do is look at Buck Rogers, Ironman, Terminator, Bionic Woman and the possibilities are Endless. So we hope we will see some very good capstone projects coming out of this course.
