Although Matsushita and Activelink have rolled out a rehabilitating robotic suit aimed at giving handicapped individuals their ability to maneuver their own body parts once again, it appears that Claudia Mitchell has regained her sense of movement using a slightly different apparatus. Touted as wearing the "world's first" bionic arm controlled by thought alone, she now has the ability to carry out simple, albeit quite critical tasks again such as cutting up food. Doctors have re-routed the nerve endings in her arm to "a patch of skin on her chest," essentially enabling her prosthetic arm to respond to her thoughts concerning movement. Furthermore, a recent study of her wrist, hand, and elbow functions revealed that she could perform tasks "four times quicker than with a conventional prosthesis," and the team hopes to install "touch sensors" on the artificial hand in order to allow for tactile feedback in the future. Claudia seems to be understandably thrilled with the results thus far, as it even allows her to accomplish tasks such as putting on makeup and feeding herself -- but we're slightly disappointed that she apparently hasn't given a round of Wii Sports a go to build up those oh-so-crucial hand-eye coordination skills, but we're sure that challenge is just around the bend.

[Via Digg]

The last time we checked in on electronic nose technology, hospitals were using the still-boutique devices for very specialized institutional work such as monitoring nasty bacteria outbreaks. Recent breakthroughs by a company called Nanomix, however, could make E-Noses a standard tool in every patient examination room, with UC Berkeley researchers using the company's tech to design cheap devices that can "sniff out" disease-laden molecules in samples a person's breath. Nanomix's "Sensation" detection platform uses multiple, configurable carbon nanotube-based sensors to instantly provide a reading from a puff or air, although the exact diseases that the battery-powered devices will be programmed to detect have not been announced. We do know that the first application of this tech will probably be for carbon dioxide detection, allowing emergency personnel to immediately determine the efficacy of breathing tubes used to stabilize patients on board an ambulance.