Chances are, you haven’t heard of Haidar Taleb yet, but he’s on a mission to inspire the world. On Monday, the disabled 47-year-old from the UAE is set to embark on a record-breaking 200 mile voyage across the desert in a solar-powered wheelchair he designed and built himself. “With this journey I hope to raise awareness [...]
Twelve people left almost blind by a hereditary condition that strikes in childhood are to receive the world’s first eye therapy derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Stargardt’s macular dystrophy currently affects 1 in 8,000 people in the US. Their sight deteriorates from around age six when retinal pigment epithelial cells (RPEs) start to [...]
A Bristol hospital is pioneering the use of a new technology which creates ‘tailor-made’ knee replacements. The Visionaire system, which is produced by global healthcare company Smith & Nephew, is targeted at people who have developed painful knee arthritis, sometimes following knee ligament damage while playing sport earlier in life, or more frequently as part [...]
A new online forum aims to help carers and people who have impairments or health conditions that keep them from leaving home. The website founders, Dav and Calsie, have personal experience of being ‘housebound’ and felt there was not enough quality services or support for housebound people. Understanding that family members are often busy and [...]
A man with an inherited form of blindness has been able to identify letters and a clock face using a pioneering implant, researchers say. Miikka Terho, 46, from Finland, was fitted with an experimental chip behind his retina in Germany. Success was also reported in other patients. The chip allows a patient to detect objects [...]
There are two pacemakers in the picture above. There’s the typical clunky, stone shaped device with wires on the right — and on the left, a device dwarfed even by a one-cent coin. This is the Medtronic wireless pacemaker, just revealed at TEDMED 2010, which can be implanted directly into your heart via catheter and permanently [...]
Today, prosthetics are a world apart from these pre-digital age examples, using advanced robotic and cybernetic technologies and tools such as 3-d printers for mass customization. As such vintage prosthetics often have the particularly strange look which is both creepy and fascinating and accompanies technological obsolescence. Head on over to oobject to flick through this [...]
The fourth annual National Get Online Week (18-24 October 2010) is set to be the biggest yet, according to organisers UK online centres. The first Get online day in 2007 successfully got 10,000 people online for the first time; this year’s aim is to encourage 80,000 people into nearly 3,000 Get online week events across [...]
An exhibition bringing together the latest innovations in technology and services available to visually-impaired people returns to Kensington Town Hall on 2-3 November. From trialling a guide dog to seeing how your mobile phone can be transformed into a text magnifying CCTV device, the QAC Sight Village brings a wide range of sight solutions under [...]
Giving disabled babies the power of movement could improves their development. Babies with physical disabilities don’t have the same opportunities to explore their environment as their peers, which is why giving them the infant equivalent of powered exoskeletons is a splendid idea. But it’s the control mechanism on this particular baby robo-chair that’s the real genius: [...]
