or aid in stroke recovery is a multibillion-dollar endeavor that only rarely pays off in the form of government-approved pharmaceuticals.
Drug companies spend years testing safety and dosage in the clinic, only to find in Phase III clinical efficacy trials that target compounds have little to no benefit.
because they have spent so much money on developing drugs that don work. They end up focusing somewhere else.
whether a drug works a reduction of 70 percent that Krebs says would translate to a similar reduction in time and cost.
the company can pursue other therapeutic avenues. If, however, a drug improves performance in 240 robot-measured patients,
the pharmaceutical company can continue investing in the trial with confidence that the drug will ultimately pass muster.
The researchers, including senior author Bruce Volpe of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N y,
The robot, developed by the team at MIT Newman Laboratory for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation, has mainly been used as a rehabilitation tool:
Patients play a video game by maneuvering the robot arm, with the robot assisting as needed. While the robot has mainly been used as a form of physical therapy,
As a patient moves the robot arm, the robot collects motion data, including the patient arm speed, movement smoothness, and aim.
For the current study, the researchers collected such data from 208 patients who worked with the robot seven days after suffering a stroke,
The researchers created an artificial neural network map that relates a patient motion data to a score that correlates with a standard clinical outcome measurement.
To determine whether a drug works, the FDA will often look to a study effect size.
Using the robot-derived neural network map, the group calculated the effect size at twice the rate usually achieved with standard clinical outcome measurements,
a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of California at Irvine. obotic measurements will help us identify promising treatments with smaller numbers of patients
#Cochlear implants with no exterior hardware Cochlear implants medical devices that electrically stimulate the auditory nerve have granted at least limited hearing to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who otherwise would be totally deaf.
however, require that a disk-shaped transmitter about an inch in diameter be affixed to the skull,
with a wire snaking down to a joint microphone and power source that looks like an oversized hearing aid around the patient ear.
Researchers at MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL), together with physicians from Harvard Medical school and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI
have developed a new, low-power signal processing chip that could lead to a cochlear implant that requires no external hardware.
The implant would be recharged wirelessly and would run for about eight hours on each charge. The researchers describe their chip in a paper theye presenting this week at the International Solid-state Circuits Conference.
The paper lead author Marcus Yip, who completed his Phd at MIT last fall and his colleagues Rui Jin and Nathan Ickes,
both in MIT Department of Electrical engineering and Computer science, will also exhibit a prototype charger that plugs into an ordinary cell phone
and can recharge the signal processing chip in roughly two minutes. he idea with this design is that you could use a phone, with an adaptor,
to charge the cochlear implant, so you don have to be plugged in, says Anantha Chandrakasan,
the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical engineering and corresponding author on the new paper. r you could imagine a smart pillow,
Adaptive reuse Existing cochlear implants use an external microphone to gather sound, but the new implant would
instead use the natural microphone of the middle ear, which is almost always intact in cochlear-implant patients.
The researchersdesign exploits the mechanism of a different type of medical device known as a middle-ear implant.
Delicate bones in the middle ear, known as ossicles, convey the vibrations of the eardrum to the cochlea,
the small, spiral chamber in the inner ear that converts acoustic signals to electrical. In patients with middle-ear implants, the cochlea is functional,
but one of the ossicles the stapes doesn vibrate with enough force to stimulate the auditory nerve.
A middle-ear implant consists of a tiny sensor that detects the ossiclesvibrations and an actuator that helps drive the stapes accordingly.
The new device would use the same type of sensor but the signal it generates would travel to a microchip implanted in the ear,
which would convert it to an electrical signal and pass it on to an electrode in the cochlea.
Lowering the power requirements of the converter chip was the key to dispensing with the skull-mounted hardware.
Chandrakasan lab at MTL specializes in low-power chips, and the new converter deploys several of the tricks that the lab has developed over the years,
such as tailoring the arrangement of low-power filters and amplifiers to the precise acoustic properties of the incoming signal.
But Chandrakasan and his colleagues also developed a new signal-generating circuit that reduces the chip power consumption by an additional 20 to 30 percent.
The key was to specify a new waveform the basic electrical signal emitted by the chip,
which is modulated to encode acoustic information that is more power-efficient to generate but still stimulates the auditory nerve in the appropriate way.
Verification The waveform was based on prior research involving simulated nerve fibers, but the MIT researchers tailored it for cochlear implants
and found a low-power way to implement it in hardware. Two of their collaborators at MEEI Konstantina Stankovic, an ear surgeon who co-led the study with Chandrakasan,
and Don Eddington tested it on four patients who already had cochlear implants and found that it had no effect on their ability to hear.
Working with another collaborator at MEEI Heidi Nakajima, the researchers have demonstrated also that the chip
and sensor are able to pick up and process speech played into a the middle ear of a human cadaver. t very cool,
says Lawrence Lustig, director of the Cochlear Implant Center at the University of California at San francisco. here a much greater stigma of having a hearing loss than there is of having a visual loss.
So people would be very keen on losing the externals for that reason alone. But then there also the added functional benefit of not having to take it off
when youe near water or worrying about components getting lost or broken or stolen. So there are some important practical considerations as well.
Lustig points out that the new cochlear implant would require a more complex surgery than existing implants do. current cochlear-implant operation takes an hour, hour and a half,
he says. y guess is that the first surgeries will take three to four hours.
It a window into processes happening at the millisecond and millimeter scale, says Aude Oliva, a principal research scientist in MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL.
The most commonly used type of brain scan, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri), measures changes in blood flow
However, it works too slowly to keep up with the brain millisecond-by-millisecond dynamics. Another imaging technique, known as magnetoencephalography (MEG), uses an array of hundreds of sensors encircling the head to measure magnetic fields produced by neuronal activity in the brain.
These sensors offer a dynamic portrait of brain activity over time, down to the millisecond, but do not tell the precise location of the signals.
To combine the time and location information generated by these two scanners, the researchers used a computational technique called representational similarity analysis,
but the MIT researchers are the first to use it to link fmri and MEG data from human subjects.
and twice in an MEG scanner giving the researchers a huge set of data on the timing and location of brain activity.
Millisecond by millisecond By analyzing this data, the researchers produced a timeline of the brain object-recognition pathway that is very similar to results previously obtained by recording electrical signals in the visual cortex of monkeys,
but Cichy et al. come closer to characterizing the dynamic emergence of representational geometries across stages of processing in humans than any previous work.
The MIT researchers are now using representational similarity analysis to study the accuracy of computer models of vision by comparing brain scan data with the modelspredictions of how vision works.
It could also shed light on processes that underlie conditions such as memory disorders or dyslexia, and could benefit patients suffering from paralysis
or neurodegenerative diseases. his is the first time that MEG and fmri have been connected in this way, giving us a unique perspective,
Pantazis says. e now have the tools to precisely map brain function both in space and time,
#Bringing the world reboot-less updates It s an annoyance for the individual computer user:
You ve updated your operating system and now you need to reboot. This is so the computer can switch to the modified source code.
Imagine however having to update and reboot hundreds or thousands of computers operating in large companies and organizations:
It can have a significant impact in lost time and money as computers and online services shut down sometimes for hours.
To avoid downtime organizations will usually wait for low-traffic periods to update but this can leave the servers outdated or vulnerable to cyber attacks.
In 2008 Jeff Arnold 07 MENG 08 along with a team of MIT computer scientists and engineers began solving this issue by developing
and commercializing software called Ksplice that automatically applies patches (security updates or bug fixes) to an operating system on the fly without requiring a reboot.
Based on Arnold s award-winning MIT master s thesis the novel software compares changes between the old
and updated code and implements those changes into a running Linux kernel an operating system s core data-processing component.
In essence it does something that could normally be achieved only by shutting down the operating system. The software also incorporates novel techniques that remove the need for programmer intervention with the code (a trademark of performing updates without Ksplice)
which decreases the cost and risk of error Arnold says. The aim is to allow administrators the benefit of the update
while eliminating both the cost and downtime for the users Arnold says. After winning the 2009 MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition for the software Arnold co-founded Ksplice Inc. with Waseem Daher 07 MENG 08 Tim Abbott 07 SM 08
and Anders Kaseorg 08 in Cambridge to launch it as a commercial product. Arnold served as the company s CEO.
In just 18 months Ksplice accumulated 700 customers independent firms government agencies and Fortune 500 companies that were running the software on more than 100000 servers.
Then the startup sold for an undisclosed amount to technology giant Oracle which is now providing the software to its Oracle Linux customers
which include banks retail firms and telecommunications companies worldwide. After the purchase the Ksplice team joined Oracle to help the company integrate the software in its products.
As of today Ksplice has only ever run on Linux operating systems. But Daher says the code is written in a way that should make it potentially expandable to other products such as Mac and Windows operating systems.
Object focusedthe process of updating running kernels is called hot updating or hot patching and predates Ksplice.
But Ksplice s novelty is that it constructs hot patches using the object code binary that a computer can understand instead of the source code computer instructions written
and modified as text by a programmer (such as in C++ or Java). Hot patching a program without Ksplice requires a programmer to construct replacement source code
or manually inspect the code to create an update. Programmers might also need to resolve ambiguity in the code say choosing the correct location in computer memory
when two or more software components have the same name. Ksplice however hot patches the object code using two novel techniques invented by Arnold.
The first called pre-post differencing creates object code before a patch (pre) and object code modified by the patch (post) on the fly.
It then compares the pre and post code to determine what code has been modified extracts the changed code
and puts the code into its own updated object file which it will plug into the running kernel.
Essentially it makes changes to functions modified by the patch and points to relocated updated versions of those functions.
The second technique called run-pre matching computes the address in computer memory of ambiguous code by using custom computation to compare the pre code with the finalized running kernel (run code.
The source of Kspliceksplice s roots trace back to 2006 when Arnold was charged with implementing a security update for MIT s Student Information Processing Board that arrived on a weekday.
while the servers were in heavy use he delayed installing the update until the weekend.
This wait unfortunately resulted in a cyber attack that required reinstalling all the system software. That s what motivated
You can t bring servers down right away and can t wait until you have a chance to update
Under the tutelage of Frans Kaashoek the Charles A. Piper Professor of Computer science and Engineering Arnold started developing Ksplice for his graduate thesis
and accounting challenging for people with strictly computer science backgrounds Daher says. For help they turned to MIT s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS)
It was valuable to hear their war stories and get their take on some of the challenges they were facing.
Arnold and Daher are now working on another software startup at the Cambridge Business Center and still keep in touch with the VMS they say.
#Mobile money helps Kenyans weather financial storms Only about one-fourth of Kenyans have access to a traditional bank,
But a new study co-authored by MIT economist Tavneet Suri shows that a growing form of electronic payments is helping Kenyans weather these financial problems by letting them informally borrow
and lend money more easily. The electronic payments system, known as M-PESA, was introduced in 2007
and is used now by at least 70 percent of households in the country In a new paper published in the American Economic Review,
William Jack of Georgetown University, show that income shocks force households without access to M-PESA to reduce their consumption by 7 percent more than households in the M-PESA network.
That means the electronic money-transfers let people smooth out, as economists say, their spending meaning they are less likely ever to have to cut back on paying for essential needs. he people who use M-PESA have a smaller drop in consumption
when something bad happens, says Suri, an associate professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of management. heye more likely to get money from their friends and family,
and they receive from more different people. Informal insurance networks As Suri and Jack emphasize,
the agricultural nature of the Kenyan economy undergirds the sudden rise in M-PESA use.
Droughts, storms, and other crop problems mean income can be quite irregular for millions of Kenyans;
as a result, they don know how much money they will make, and save, from season to season or month to month.
Many Kenyans also face financial crises due to health problems. In all, about 50 percent of households in the study reported serious negative income shocks in the six months preceding the survey. hey face very high-risk environments
and they don have the tools we have to deal with risk, Suri says. hey also don have government programs like unemployment insurance or health insurance,
and they don have private insurance either. So they end up making deals with each other. In Kenya as in many developing countries neighbors
friends, and relatives often rely on informal agreements to make loans with one another when times are hard.
However, those networks can be strained by geography: People are most likely to be in contact with other people who live close to them,
and use those contacts as part of their risk-sharing networks. But that proximity means that the same environmental
Mobile phone usage is far more prevalent in Kenya than traditional banking is and the system lets people transfer money by text message.
Moreover, as Suri and Jack have found, the average distance over which an M-PESA operates is 150 to 200 kilometers,
which means people are easily able to tap into money transfers from distant sources. Connecting everywhere, not just the capital Suri
And they uncovered additional geographic patterns about the electronic money transfers: Not only is the average distance between parties significant,
In short, money transfers are made not just from wealthier urban Kenyans to their poorer rural friends
and relatives. verybody assumes it just money going out from the capital, Nairobi, and that not true, Suri says. here are a lot of local transfers,
this is not just people in the big city sending money. Other scholars say the results are interesting,
and suggest follow-up questions about the larger impact, if it can be pinpointed, of mobile technologies. t's intriguing to observe that this cost reduction allows families
even though access to formal insurance is limited very, says Francis Vella, an economist at Georgetown University who has read the paper.
However, Vella adds, oving forward, it will be important to ask if, as well as helping people share their resources more efficiently,
Suri has studied mobile money in Kenya extensively in recent years but some of her new research will take her in different directions.
Among other things, she is now studying the financing of small-scale distributed solar power in areas of Kenya without either a formal grid or established banking systems;
she has also been examining housing prices in urban neighborhoods in Kenya, and the impact of new technologies on voter mobilization
version of Batman famed utility-belt grappling gun: At the pull of a trigger, the handheld device can hoist two people about 30 stories up a rope in 30 seconds.
Exciting, for sure. But despite its appeal as what Atlas cofounder and APA co-inventor Nathan Ball 5, SM 7 calls a ee-whiz gadgetwith seemingly limitless,
Roughly the size of a small shoebox, the aluminum-cased APA which began as a prototype for MIT Soldier Design Competition in 2005 has a handle with direction control switches (up or down) and a trigger.
capstan-based mechanism ensures that the battery-powered device can lift two soldiers sometimes carrying 80 to 100 pounds of equipment swiftly along an attached rope, without jamming.
A lightweight, interchangeable battery capable of hundreds of feet of hoisting per charge snaps into the front.
dubbed the APA-5 developed with funding from the Office of Naval Research Tech Solutions Program weighs roughly 20 pounds
and can lift up to 600 pounds at speeds of up to several feet per second. First designed for soldiers who plunged into caves and wells in Iraq and Afghanistan
the APA is now being used by all four military branches on the battlefield and in training to climb mountains, buildings, and ships.
It even being used in helicopter extraction and rescue missions. Finding steady success with its military customers, Atlas is now expanding its Charlestown, Mass.
who won the 2007 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for his work (providing $30, 000 that further funded APA prototyping).
as with conventional pulleys and winches, the rope fed through the APA weaves between a series of rollers that sit on top of a turning, battery-powered spindle.
and Daniel Walker 5, SM 9 for the annual MIT Soldier Design Competition, which challenges student teams to invent technologies based on military requests.
Original specifications for the invention called for a device that weighed less than 25 pounds and could hoist 250 pounds 50 feet vertically in five seconds a remarkably high power-to-weight ratio exceeding that of a Dodge Viper, the team calculated.
Using drill batteries and other custom-designed equipment, the team completed a working prototype that achieved a 50-foot lift in seven seconds.
Taking third place, and $3, 000 for further prototyping, the four-man team co-founded Atlas Devices in Boston to develop
and launch their first product, the APA-3. Weighing 28 pounds, the first APA could lift up to 350 pounds at 5 feet per second,
and was adopted by several U s. military groups.)As one of the few companies in the relatively new but growing power-ascension market, Atlas has needed to continually hone APA specifications to meet field and customer expectations.
It a balancing act, Ball says. Originally, for instance, when power ascension was more novel, users requested an ascension pace of 10 feet per second.
But Atlas found that as soon as you maneuver over, say, more dangerous terrain or over edge of a wall, going that fast could mean crashes and injuries.
So for some customers that operate in dangerous terrain, they compensated with slower speeds, but a higher lifting capacity
which was, in fact, beneficial, Ball says. The device can also now be submerged in water for maritime use. ialing in the specs has been a continual process,
For example, Atlas recently made the switch to more advanced ropes that have higher tensile strength, with smaller diameters. o carry a 200-foot section of rope was up to 15 pounds;
now it closer to 8 pounds, Ball says. ee always trying to find better ways to accomplish things.
Important piece of the equipment locker In its early days, MIT Venture Mentoring Service played a role in Atlasdevelopment,
Additional help came from MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. Ball specifically credits former technology transfer specialist Lisa Shaler-Clark as instrumental in taking the APA rom the lab bench to the field.
She walked the Atlas team through startup basics, such as legal and financial work, and doing business with the government. isa gave us a lot of those nuts
and boltsof building a business, says Ball, who comes back to speak at MIT classes from time to time.
Today, Atlas is aiming for wider adoption of the APA. ike any good ee-whiz gadget,
when customers start thinking of it less as just a gadget, and instead as an important component in their equipment locker.
Also, the APA can function as a backup for a helicopter if something goes awry with the primary hoist:
rescuers can store the APA in a seat compartment, as it won compromise the chopper weight capacity.
hoists for workers at dams, buildings, bridges, and massive wind turbines; as well as for first responders. here a broad spectrum of users people who use rope access as part of their work for
whom this technology would make a lot of sense, Ball says. e want to make that true for as many places as possible to benefit from it
Having Medicaid increases emergency room visits Adults who are covered by Medicaid use emergency rooms 40 percent more than those in similar circumstances who do not have health insurance, according to a unique new study,
co-authored by an MIT economist, that sheds empirical light on the inner workings of health care in the U s. The study takes advantage of Oregon recent use of a lottery to assign access to Medicaid, the government-backed health-care plan for low-income
Americans, to certain uninsured adults. The research examines emergency room records for roughly 25 000 people over 18 months. hen you cover the uninsured,
says Amy Finkelstein, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT and a principal investigator of the study,
along with Katherine Baicker, a professor at the Harvard School of Public health. The study, which is being published today in the journal Science,
and medical conditions, including types of conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary-care situations. n no case were we able to find any subpopulations,
however, suggest nuances to the current debates over the expansion of Medicaid, medical costs, and the role of emergency rooms in providing care.
On one level, the results accord with a traditional economics framework suggesting that insurance, by lowering out-of-pocket costs, would increase the use of medical care.
Or, as Finkelstein observes, f wee lowered the price of the emergency department, we would expect people to use it more.
However, Medicaid also lowers the out-of-pocket costs of other types of health care, such as primary-care doctors.
Some policy analysts have suggested that expanding Medicaid could reduce emergency department visits by the formerly uninsured by bringing them into more regular contact with primary-care doctors and clinics for preventive care.
In theory, that could also reduce overall system costs, since urgent care is expensive. Indeed, prior work by Finkelstein, Baicker,
and others on Oregon lottery applicants showed that people who obtain Medicaid increase their use of primary and preventive care.
But as Finkelstein points out the net effect of Medicaid in the study was to also increase use of emergency services.
which makes empirical work all the more important. Other scholars in the field say the study opens the way for further scrutiny of emergency room use.
Amitabh Chandra, an economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who has read the paper, praises the study as xemplary social science,
and says the results underscore our need to learn more about the circumstances in which people use emergency rooms. eople are going to want to find out how sick they are,
Evidence from Oregon Health insurance Experiment, were lead author Sarah Taubman of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Heidi Allen of Columbia University School of Social work,
and Bill Wright of the Center for Outcomes Research and Education at Providence Health and Services in Portland, Ore.
In a 2011 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, they showed that Medicaid coverage increases doctor visits,
prescription drug use, and hospital admissions; reduces out-of-pocket expenses or unpaid medical debt; and increases self-reported good health.
In a 2013 paper published in the New england Journal of Medicine, they showed that Medicaid coverage reduces the incidence of depression
but does not produce measured improvements in physical health. Finkelstein says she has been motivated by the Oregon study,
Co-founded with Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, the group is meant to encourage randomized evaluations on policies
which was founded in 2003 to support randomized trials in development economics globally. t relatively rare to have randomized this kind of controlled trial on a major policy issue,
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