Adam Montandon's blog

Read my latest news and digital adventures updated every day.

Yesterday Professor Yang and his team from Imperial College kindly offered to show me around the robotic facility and demonstrate some of his latest research projects. I was guided around the amazing Institute of Biomedical Engineering near South Kensington.

It was absolutely fascinating to be allowed to play with state of the art medical robotic technology, and the work Professor Yang and his team are doing is truly mind blowing. Firstly, her showed me a robot-surgery machine that allowed you to use 3D vision to manipulate medical tools in a very easy to use way. The robots responded to your finger movements very smoothly, and it was a truly unique experience to play with this sort of technology.

He also showed me a "cufflink" sized chip that was fully wifi enabled, and was able to detect the motions of your inner ear, sensing balance and transmitting it wirelessly. Not only does this have amazing medical potetial to detect bone, joint and balance problems, but it could also be integrated into hearing aids to detect a fall or trip. This would be a fantastic "first alert" service to the elderly and those with mobility problems.

Also I was pleased to see that Professor Yang's team had a good sense of humour and had re-programmed their amazing tiny microchip for some really fun gaming experiences. They had created a sort of "snowboarding" type 3D game where you must shift your balance to control the characters on screen down an icy hill. It was such smooth interaction. I expect that we will see more of this kind of subtle wifi interaction in the future.

It was nice to hear Professor Yang talk about "pervasive computing" from a medical perspective, as this will have huge impact on peoples lives.