– The purpose of this paper is to review developments on the internet, especially those of general cybernetic interest.

Design/methodology/approach – The need to reduce carbon emissions on account of the atmospheric greenhouse effect has recently been queried, but observations of effects on the oceans confirm its continuing importance. A means of viewing new buildings in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the site of origin of much of cybernetics, is indicated, as is also a remarkable development of an advanced prosthetic device. Sources of information about the recent WikiLeaks or “Cablegate” events are reviewed.

Findings – Effects of acidification on ocean biota are serious. New buildings on the MIT campus are not following the example of the bizarre Stata Center. The robotic exoskeleton is a valuable development made under unusual conditions. No attempt is made to judge ethics or long-term effects of WikiLeaks activity but it is shown to be wide ranging and to be defended eloquently by its main operative.

Practical implications – The need to reduce carbon emissions is confirmed by studies of the oceans, probably among other factors. The exoskeleton development is a valuable addition to prosthetic technology as well as an example of what can be done with limited resources.

Originality/value – It is hoped this is a valuable periodic review.

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Many diseases affect human movement functions and daily living. In order to recover the ability of movement, rehabilitation is the only way to improve the situation for many clients. Therefore, this study proposed a novel robot with brain-computer interface for rehabilitation exercises, namely BCRS (Brian-Controlled Rehabilitation System) and using multiple kernel learning (MKL) trains the classifier. BCRS detects and classifies the P300 and non-P300 signals from human brain and determines what kind of the rehabilitation exercises will be chosen. Three types of exercises, passive range of motion, isotonic, and isometric exercise, were realized in the system and support vector machine was used as the classification algorithm. For the three exercises, a new P300 panel was designed and composed of 25 commands. Through the experiments, we can find that BCRS can achieve good performance for rehabilitation exercises and MKL is a good method for EEG to have good accuracy of P300 signal classification and low training time than support vector machine (SVM).

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In the case of some elderly whose motor ability is deteriorated, the environment perception ability is sometimes deteriorated also. In order to deal with that problem, the power-assist robot with the perception-assist, which assists not only the user’s motion but also the user’s interaction with an environment, has been proposed. The power-assist robot with the perception-assist has some sensors in order to monitor the interaction between the user and the environment. The robot tries to modify the user’s motion automatically during the power-assist if the robot recognizes any problems in the user’s motion. A human has a dexterous hand with many DOFs, and performs tasks while using many tools in the hand. Since many kinds of tools are used in daily activities, the undesired motion such as a risky behavior to the person is different between the tasks or tools. From these reasons, when the power-assist robot carries out the perception-assist, the robot needs to perform the perception-assist based on the user’s motion and the grasped tool by the user. However, it is not realistic to prepare the perception-assist required for every tool or task because there are many kinds of tools and tasks. In this paper, the perception-assist for an upper-limb power-assist robot is discussed. The robot learns the properly required perception-assist based on EMG signals. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated by the performing experiments.

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Essential Tremor (ET) refers to involuntary movements of a part of the body. ET patients have serious difficulties in performing daily living activities. We have been developing a myoelectric controlled exoskeletal robot to suppress tremor. However, the EMG signal of ET patients contains not only signals from voluntary movements but also noise from involuntary tremors. Then, we have developed a signal processing method to suppress tremor noise present in the surface EMG signal. The proposed filter is based on the hypothesis that tremor noise could be approximate to powered sine wave. In this paper, we have integrated tremor canceling filter and neural network (NN) to recognize the tremor patient’s movement. According to the result, it was confirmed that the proposal filter increased accuracy of recognition, especially stable phase on elbow flexed position as “OFF”.

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Robots are becoming more interactive and assisting to human beings day by day. They are serving humanity in the fields of industry, defense and medicine. Exoskeletons are also devices that reside in category of wearable robotics. An exoskeleton is an external structural mechanism with joints and links corresponding to those of the human body. With applications in rehabilitation medicine and virtual reality simulation, exoskeletons offer benefits for both disabled and healthy populations. Exoskeletons can be used as a capability magnifier or assisting device. This paper presents a proposed design for smart active exoskeleton for lower limbs. This proposed exoskeleton design not only assist a person but also tries to improve its GAIT. The twin wearable legs are powered by Actuators, all controlled by a microprocessor. The simulation results of the control mechanism shows its smart capabilities. In addition, the processor based control produces a more natural muscle like activity and as such can be considered a soft and bio-mimetic actuation system. This capacity to “replicate” the function of natural muscle and inherent safety is extremely important when working in close proximity to humans. The integration of the components sections and testing of the performance will also be considered to show how the structure and actuators can be combined to produce the various systems needed for a highly flexible/low weight clinically viable rehabilitation exoskeleton.

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