IS CYBERPUNK 2077 ALREADY A REALITY? A JOURNEY INTO THE FIELD OF BIOENGINEERING

In recent years, research in the bioengineering field has made great strides thanks to the study of new materials and the advancement of myelectronics. In general, as a prosthesis, any artificial implementation to the impairment or dysfunction of an organ is defined , even simple eyeglasses are identified as such. techsmartinfo

From ancient times to now, however, we have gone from the piratical wooden leg to the lightweight carbon fiber limbs, interchangeable for different situations and ultra-resistant. The major revolution is due precisely to the use of new super light and super resistant materialsthat allow the body to use the prosthesis without having to make extreme efforts, recently then the field of research of materials has expanded towards new polymers, more and more similar to biological tissues or even better than them.

Finally, the new studies related to electronics in the muscular field (myoelectronics) have made it possible to implement the efficiency of the neural connections with the prosthesis even to create artificial devices that can be controlled directly by the owner through "thought" .

When fantasy and reality meet

Today with the term prosthesis we can refer not only to limbs but also to internal organs, from the pancreas to the kidneys to the heart, to the sense organs such as implants for the deaf and visually impaired, often reaching the limit between bio-engineering and bio-robotics.

The comparison with works such as Cyberpunk 2077 or with other more classic ones is spontaneous, obviously you do not imagine hidden blades or rockets coming out of the fingers, but in some cases the new prostheses would not only seem biologically comparable with our organs but also more efficient. is the new artificial eye technology developed by researchers at the University of Hong Kong , which mimics the structure of the human eye and has a faster reaction time than a real eyeball. The research is brand new and was published in Naturein May 2020, the leader of the research group, engineer Zhiyong Fan, says that in the future prostheses like this could lead to improved visual-cognitive abilities thanks to humanoid robotics.

Our eye is able to record variations in brightness thanks to the retina, a dome formed by receptor cells that transform light energy into electrical potential and send the signal directly to the brain. Fan's artificial eye was similarly constructed with an aluminum oxide dome covered with a large number of nanometer sensors made of a photosensitive material, perovskite.

These sensors send signals to external circuits that reprocess them and through electrical impulses are able to transmit them to the brain, just like the retina. However, this artificial dome is able to record the light variation with a speed much faster than the human eye (40-140 ms vs the natural 30-40 ms) and is able to obtain a better resolution thanks to the presence of 460 million of sensors against the 10 million of the retina.

The disadvantages are, however, a lower field of view (about 100 degrees against the biological 150) and the fact that for now the optimal efficiency levels for the connections to the sensors of the robotic prosthesis have not been reached, for now therefore the image processed by the eye. artificial seems to reach a maximum resolution of 100 pixels.

We are already in the future

However, the fact remains that this type of prosthesis would allow the blind for now to be able to return to the view, albeit in low resolution, of the world around them, helping them in disability. As research progresses, it will one day be possible to increase the resolution until a more efficient visual system is obtained than the natural biological one. Another example is implantation for the hearing impaired via the cochlear implant. This consists of two parts, an external one consisting of a microphone-receiver, positioned behind the ear, similar to the conventional hearing aid. It transforms sounds into electrical signals and sends them to a language processor .

The processor is specially programmed to transmit the most important information for language recognition. The internal part, positioned by surgery, is composed of a ceramic or titanium receiver-stimulator with a receiving antenna connected to a microchip and a system of electrodes. The antenna is held in its position by a magnet. The microchip decodes the information received from the external processor, transmits it to the intracchlear electrodes and thus causes the stimulation of the cochlear nerve fibers.

However, these systems are not without disadvantages, such as annoying background noiseor alterations in sound, due to the processor not recognizing the correct frequencies. Recently Greg Watkins, a biomedical engineer at the University of Sydney, has developed an algorithm that provides a fast and effective way to implement the prostheses and improve them without that these are to be worn by a patient .

One of the major problems in scientific research in the prosthetic field is the reference sample. There are few patients on which to work to improve the prostheses and they are often affected by different types of disabilities. Watkins, who also wears an implant for a disease that made him deaf 15 years ago, together with his collaborators has developed an algorithm to be able to make accurate and realistic predictions without the need for patient tests.

This could lead in a few years to an implementation of the capabilities of the prosthesis such as to allow high efficiency in the reception of sounds and re-processing by the nervous system., with a hearing that could therefore become more sensitive than the natural organ. Some research groups claim that in a few years cochlear implants could be able to detect sounds even at frequencies of 20,000 Hz or below 50 Hz that are inaudible to humans.

Finally, as far as the arts are concerned, every day research leads to new goals that were unthinkable even just 10 years ago. Scientists at Seoul National University in South Korea have synthesized intelligent skin from anatomical silicone using new crystalline structures.

This ultra-thin crystalline silicone allows you to coat the prosthetic limbs and connect them to electrical sensors that allow you to recognize sensationssuch as heat, cold or light pressure. In collaboration with the University of Coventry in the United Kingdom, this discovery led to the first surgery for the implantation of 100 microelectrodes, connected to fibers of the central nervous system to allow data processing and return direct feedback to the owner of the prosthesis.

This year, several scientific articles have been published based on the study of targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) , in which the nervous system is "redirected" to muscles that are still present. By contracting, these transmit a signal to the artificial fibers which in turn send it to the prosthesis: in this way the control of the prostheses is almost simultaneous and more intuitive.

Thanks to these researches, prosthetic limbs could soon become more sensitive than biological ones and, thanks to the implementation of new materials, more resistant. There are still problems relating to the intervention and maintenance of these limbs, but we can say that it is surprising that the first successful interventions of these prostheses that allow mental control have been carried out already in 2018 in Italy. A consequence of this incredible technological advancement is, for example, the possibility for many people with disabilities to be able to do what they love, like the story of Daniel Melville , a young gamer without an arm who thanks to the use of new instant feedback and printing 3D is back to playwithout any problem, even entering the Guinness Book of Records as the first owner of a 3D printed prehensile bionic hand.

At this point Cyberpunk 2077 does not seem to be that far away, indeed, soon we will begin to wonder where the boundary between bionic prosthesis and bionic enhancement will be.

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