英文版本台词：（中文版在后面）
Looking deeply inside nature, through the magnifying glass of science, designers extract principles, processes and materials that are forming the very basis of design methodology. From synthetic constructs that resemble biological materials, to computational methods that emulate neural processes, nature is driving design.Design is also driving nature. In realms of genetics, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology, designers are growing novel technologies, not foreseen or anticipated by nature.
Bionics explores the interplay between biology and design. As you can see, my legs are bionic. Today, I will tell human stories of bionic integration; how electromechanics attached to the body, and implanted inside the body are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and human potential.
Bionics has defined my physicality. In 1982, both of my legs were amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite, incurred during a mountain-climbing accident. At that time, I didn’t view my body as broken. I reasoned that a human being can never be “broken.”Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate. This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms, to advance technology for the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately, the disability of others.I began by developing specialized limbs that allowed me to return to the vertical world of rock and ice climbing. I quickly realized that the artificial part of my body is malleable; able to take on any form, any function — a blank slate for which to create, perhaps, structures that could extend beyond biological capability. I made my height adjustable. I could be as short as five feet or as tall as I’d like.
Narrow-edged feet allowed me to climb steep rock fissures, where the human foot cannot penetrate, and spiked feet enabled me to climb vertical ice walls, without ever experiencing muscle leg fatigue.Through technological innovation, I returned to my sport, stronger and better. Technology had eliminated my disability, and allowed me a new climbing prowess. As a young man, I imagined a future world where technology so advanced could rid the world of disability, a world in which neural implants would allow the visually impaired to see. A world in which the paralyzed could walk, via body exoskeletons.
Sadly, because of deficiencies in technology, disability is rampant in the world. This gentleman is missing three limbs. As a testimony to current technology, he is out of the wheelchair, but we need to do a better job in bionics, to allow, one day, full rehabilitation for a person with this level of injury. At the MIT Media Lab, we’ve established the Center for Extreme Bionics. The mission of the center is to put forth fundamental science and technological capability that will allow the biomechatronic and regenerative repair of humans, across a broad range of brain and body disabilities.
I’ll begin with mechanical interface. In the area of design, we still do not understand how to attach devices to the body mechanically. It’s extraordinary to me that in this day and age, one of the most mature, oldest technologies in the human timeline, the shoe, still gives us blisters. How can this be? We have no idea how to attach things to our bodies. This is the beautifully lyrical design work of Professor Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab, showing spatially varying exoskeletal impedances, shown here by color variation in this 3D-printed model.Imagine a future where clothing is stiff and soft where you need it,when you need it, for optimal support and flexibility, without ever causing discomfort.
My bionic limbs are attached to my biological body via synthetic skins with stiffness variations, that mirror my underlying tissue biomechanics. To achieve that mirroring, we first developed a mathematical model of my biological limb. To that end, we used imaging tools such as MRI, to look inside my body, to figure out the geometries and locations of various tissues. We also took robotic tools — here’s a 14-actuator circle that goes around the biological limb. The actuators come in, find the surface of the limb, measure its unloaded shape, and then they push on the tissues to measure tissue compliances at each anatomical point.
We combine these imaging and robotic data to build a mathematical description of my biological limb, shown on the left. You see a bunch of points, or nodes? At each node, there’s a color that represents tissue compliance. We then do a mathematical transformation to the design of the synthetic skin, shown on the right. And we’ve discovered optimality is: where the body is stiff, the synthetic skin should be soft,where the body is soft, the synthetic skin is stiff, and this mirroring occurs across all tissue compliances. With this framework, we’ve produced bionic limbs that are the most comfortable limbs I’ve ever worn. Clearly, in the future, our clothing, our shoes, our braces, our prostheses, will no longer be designed and manufactured using artisan strategies, but rather, data-driven quantitative frameworks. In that future, our shoes will no longer give us blisters.
We’re also embedding sensing and smart materials into the synthetic skins. This is a material developed by SRI International, California.Under electrostatic effect, it changes stiffness. So under zero voltage, the material is compliant, it’s floppy like paper. Then the button’s pushed, a voltage is applied, and it becomes stiff as a board.
Next, dynamic interface. How do my bionic limbs move like flesh and bone? At my MIT lab, we study how humans with normal physiologiesstand, walk and run. What are the muscles doing, and how are they controlled by the spinal cord? This basic science motivates what we build. We’re building bionic ankles, knees and hips. We’re building body parts from the ground up. The bionic limbs that I’m wearing are called BiOMs. They’ve been fitted to nearly 1,000 patients, 400 of which have been wounded U.S. soldiers.
At heel strike, under computer control, the system controls stiffness, to attenuate the shock of the limb hitting the ground. Then at mid-stance, the bionic limb outputs high torques and powers to lift the person into the walking stride, comparable to how muscles work in the calf region. This bionic propulsion is very important clinically to patients. So on the left, you see the bionic device worn by a lady, on the right, a passive device worn by the same lady, that fails to emulate normal muscle function, enabling her to do something everyone should be able to do: go up and down their steps at home. Bionics also allows for extraordinary athletic feats. Here’s a gentleman running up a rocky pathway. This is Steve Martin — not the comedian — who lost his legs in a bomb blast in Afghanistan.
We’re also building exoskeletal structures using these same principles, that wrap around the biological limb. This gentleman does not have any leg condition, any disability. He has a normal physiology,so these exoskeletons are applying muscle-like torques and powers,so that his own muscles need not apply those torques and powers.This is the first exoskeleton in history that actually augments human walking. It significantly reduces metabolic cost. It’s so profound in its augmentation, that when a normal, healthy person wears the device for 40 minutes and then takes it off, their own biological legs feel ridiculously heavy and awkward. We’re beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and faster and more efficient.
Moving on to electrical interface: How do my bionic limbs communicate with my nervous system? Across my residual limb are electrodes that measure the electrical pulse of my muscles. That’s communicated to the bionic limb, so when I think about moving my phantom limb, the robot tracks those movement desires. This diagram shows fundamentally how the bionic limb is controlled. So we model the missing biological limb, and we’ve discovered what reflexes occurred, how the reflexes of the spinal cord are controlling the muscles. And that capability is embedded in the chips of the bionic limb. What we’ve done, then, is we modulate the sensitivity of the reflex, the modeled spinal reflex, with the neural signal, so when I relax my muscles in my residual limb, I get very little torque and power, but the more I fire my muscles, the more torque I get, and I can even run.And that was the first demonstration of a running gait under neural command. Feels great.
We want to go a step further. We want to actually close the loopbetween the human and the bionic external limb. We’re doing experiments where we’re growing nerves, transected nerves, through channels, or micro-channel arrays. On the other side of the channel,the nerve then attaches to cells, skin cells and muscle cells. In the motor channels, we can sense how the person wishes to move. That can be sent out wirelessly to the bionic limb, then [sensory information] on the bionic limb can be converted to stimulations in adjacent channels, sensory channels. So when this is fully developed and for human use, persons like myself will not only have synthetic limbs that move like flesh and bone, but actually feel like flesh and bone.
It’s not well appreciated, but over half of the world’s population suffers from some form of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition,and because of poor technology, too often, conditions result in disability and a poorer quality of life. Basic levels of physiological function should be a part of our human rights. Every person should have the right to live life without disability if they so choose — the right to live life without severe depression; the right to see a loved one, in the case of seeing-impaired; or the right to walk or to dance, in the case of limb paralysis or limb amputation. As a society, we can achieve these human rights, if we accept the proposition that humans are not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation. Indeed, through fundamental advances in bionics in this century, we will set the technological foundation for an enhanced human experience, and we will end disability.
After meeting her and driving home in my car, I thought, I’m an MIT professor. I have resources. Let’s build her a bionic limb, to enable her to go back to her life of dance. I brought in MIT scientists with expertise in prosthetics, robotics, machine learning and biomechanics, and over a 200-day research period, we studied dance.We brought in dancers with biological limbs, and we studied how they move, what forces they apply on the dance floor, and we took those data, and we put forth fundamental principles of dance, reflexive dance capability, and we embedded that intelligence into the bionic limb. Bionics is not only about making people stronger and faster. Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into electromechanics.
中文版本：
仿生学已经定义出了我的肉体。1982年我的双腿截肢那是由于在一次登山事故引发的冻伤组织损伤而造成的。那时，我没有察觉我的身体是残缺的。我的反应是作为一个真正的人类是永远不可残缺的。相反而是技术的残缺。是技术的不发达。这个简单但强有力的想法是对行动的召唤，去提升科技，去消除我自身的残疾以及其他人的身体残疾。通过我自己设计的一些特殊肢臂我得以重返岩冰攀登那个竖着的世界。我很快意识到，我身体的人造部分是可塑造的，可以是任何形状，附有任何功能，如一张白纸一般可以被塑造成一些可能超越生物功能的结构。我还能让我的身高可调节。我可以变得只有5英尺矮或像我想要的那样高。（笑）所以当我感觉特别不好、没有安全感的时候，我就加长我的身高，而当我感觉自信娴雅的时候，我就把我的身高降低到峡谷以便给竞争对手一个机会。（笑）（掌声）狭长、 楔形的脚可以使我在陡峭的岩石裂缝中攀爬这些地方是一般人不能到达的而这个尖状的脚可使我攀爬垂直的冰壁而不会有腿部肌肉疲劳。通过技术的革新，我重新回到了更强更棒的运动中。技术消除了的我残疾并赋予了我新的攀爬能力。对于未来世界，我是这样描绘的那里有非常先进的技术可以使人们摆脱身体残疾，那里有神经植入使视障人士重见光明，那里瘫痪者借助体外骨骼行走。
我的仿生腿连接到我的生物肉体上是通过人造皮肤加上刚度变化来完成的这是反射到基础组织生物力学。为了达到这个反应，我们首先建立了一个数学模型来针对于我的生物体的腿。在那之后，我们应用了比如像核磁共振的成像工具来观察我的身体以判定出几何图形和各种组织的位置。我们也应用了机械人工具。这是一个14制动循环装置围绕着我的生物肢体。驱动装置贴近来查找这个肢体表面，测量它无加载时的形状，然后向前推进到表面组织来测量组织符合于每一个解剖点。我们结合这些图像和机器数据来建立数据描述来针对于我的生物肢休，左图所示。你们看到一群的点点，或结点。在每一个结点，有一个颜色代表组织合规。我们然后做了一个数学转换到人造皮肤设计如右图所示，我们所发现的最佳性是当身体是拘谨僵硬时人造皮肤应是软柔的，当身体软柔时，人造皮肤是紧硬的，这种反应的出现在所有的组织依从合规中。用这个构架，我们研制了仿生肢体这也是我佩用过的最舒适的假肢了。很清楚在未来，我们的衣服，我们的鞋子，我们的支具，人体修复假体，设计以及生产时不再使用工匠式的方法，而是应用以数据驱动的定量框架结构。在那个未来，我的鞋子不会再对我们磨出水泡。
现在说到电子触面，我的这个仿生腿是如何与我的神经系统相联系的呢？我的假肢的剩余部分是电极的它可测量到我肌肉的电脉冲。这也是与生物肢体交流，因此当我想要移动我的仿生腿时这个机器装置便追踪这些移动的欲望。这张图基本上展现出这个仿生腿是如何被控制的，因此我们模拟了缺失的生物学腿，我们也发现了出现了什么样的反应，脊椎的反应是如何的控制肌肉，而这种性能已经被植入仿生腿的芯片中。我们所做的，那么，就是我们调节反应的敏感性，模仿的脊髓反应，同时是带有应用的神经信号，因此当在仿生腿上放松我的肌肉时，我得到了一点点扭力，但是我越是收紧我的肌肉，我获得的扭力就越多，我甚至可以跑了。这是作为第一个例证就是在神经指令下的跑步步态。感觉太棒了。（鼓掌）
不是很多但一半以上的世界人口承受着来自认知，情感，感觉或运动的方面的痛苦只因为贫差的技术，这些情况很多时候会导致残疾以及生活质量的低下。生理功能的基本水平应该是人权的一部分。每一个人都应当有这个权力去摆脱残疾来生活如果他们选择–没有种种沮丧的生活的权力下；去看自己亲爱的人的权力尤其是当眼见受损的情况下；或是走路或跳舞的权力，尤是在当脂臂无力或截肢的情况下。我们可以给到这些残疾的朋友一个行动的能力假如我们相信人并不会因为肢体的残缺而变得残废人是不可能变得支离破碎的真正支离破碎和残缺的，是我们人类做的建筑，我们的技术。我们人类不必受我们自己的限制，相反，我们可以通过技术创新，去超越身体的残缺。实际上，我们可以预期到本世纪在仿生学领域会有一些根本性的突破。我们将应用技术性能来服务于人们的经验中，我们将结束残疾。