Communications of the ACM
Cybathlon: World's First 'bionic Olympics' Gears p
The Cybathlon will involve six different types of competition.
Credit: BBC News
Switzerland in October will host the world's inaugural Cybathlon, with 50 teams participating in sporting events to showcase bionic technologies. "Cybathlon brings together the best of prosthetic technology from around the world with innovative ideas enabling us to be more independent and productive, making it a competition against companies and research labs too," says Kevin Evison, who will be competing with a myoelectric prosthetic arm as part of a team from Imperial College London in the U.K.Evison's event is a race to see how well artificial limbs can perform six tasks, such as cutting bread or changing a light bulb, in the shortest amount of time.
Meanwhile, the University of Essex team's David Rose will compete in an event in which he will try to control a computer game by thought using an electrode-studded cap that feeds his brain's impulses to a computer.
The Swiss University of Technology in Zurich has organized the Cybathlon to encourage engineers to create assistive technologies that are more appropriate for disabled people, as "most of the research is with able-bodied users," says University of Essex team leader Ana Matran-Fernandez. Imperial College's Ian Radcliffe says his project's emphasis is on developing inexpensive, less error-prone prosthetics using skin-reading sensors.
From BBC News
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