1 in 1000 children is born deaf. Depending on the type of hearing loss, cochlear implants can help deaf babies acquire speech almost as well as normally hearing babies.

Not too long ago, when a person was deaf they had to rely on sign language to communicate. Thanks to small implantable devices, known as cochlear implants, this has changed over the course of the past decades. About 1 in a 1000 children are born deaf, and 4 in 1000 adults in the US are profoundly deaf. To date, about 150,000 of these people have been implanted. For most of them, these neural prostheses are a lifeline that restores basic auditory function. Cochlear implants are perhaps the most successful neural prosthesis to date.

Cochlear implants work on a technical principle whose basic origins date back to the late 18th century, to Wolfgang von Kempelen. In 1769, von Kempelen, ingeniously invented the world’s first speaking machine that synthesized speech with a two part system – a circuit consisting of an acoustic source and a bank of acoustic filters. His work has inspired a long line of research and was further developed by famous engineers, such as Sir Charles Wheatstone, Alexander Graham Bell and Homer Dudley. Read the rest of this entry »

The DARPA SyNAPSE project is not the only attempt in the world of neuromorphic engineering to create larg-scale, low-power neuromorphic hardware. The European FACETS (Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States) project, currently in his month 55 of activity, is “to create a theoretical and experimental foundation for the realisation of novel computing paradigms which exploit the concepts experimentally observed in biological nervous systems”. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent post in Robotics Online, Jeff Burnstein discusses two possible, and equally likely, scenarios for the development of future robotic platforms: the Honda approach, and the GM approach. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2nd Memristor and Memristive Systems Symposium took place on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley. The 2010 symposium covered memristor technology updates, new device technologies (materials and fabrication), device models for CAD, novel circuits using memristors, and systems architecture harnessing memristor and memristive device properties. Read the rest of this entry »