Clear and simple visualizations of biomechanical data could improve rehabilitation after a stroke, accelerate the recovery from joint replacements, and prevent older people from falling, according to United Kingdom researchers. University of Strathclyde professor Philip Rowe is leading an initiative to develop bespoke software for capturing biomechanical data and presenting it in a way that would assist health care professionals in their effort to communicate movement information to patients. Currently, movement information is only available in graphical, tabular, or numerical form. The software would work with Strathclyde’s specialist motion analysis system and portable motion sensors. “By using animation, we can enable patients to visualize a movement, and how it affects their body,” Rowe says.
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Tomorrow’s Internet-connected cars could be vulnerable to hackers in the way computers are today, warn researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). During a recent test, the researchers were able to remotely control a car’s braking and other functions. “We demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input–including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on,” the researchers write. The researchers were also able to insert malicious software into the car and then erase any evidence of tampering. “Taken together, ubiquitous computer control, distributed internal connectivity, and telematics interfaces increasingly combine to provide an application software platform for external network access,” write the researchers.
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Scientists at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) have redesigned an Audi TTS with computers and global positioning system (GPS) receivers so that the car can drive itself. The car will attempt to scale Pikes Peak without a driver at race speeds following a GPS trail from start to finish. “Our first goal is to go up Pikes Peak at speeds resembling race speeds, keep the car stable around corners, and have everything work the way we want it to,” says Stanford’s Chris Gerdes. The car has reached speeds of 130 miles per hour without a driver during test runs at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It uses differential GPS, which corrects for interference in the atmosphere, and can locate the car’s position on Earth within about two centimeters. The car measures its speed and acceleration with wheel-speed sensors and an accelerometer, and also employs gyroscopes to control equilibrium and direction. “The computer puts all this information together and then compares it to a digital map to figure out how close the car is to the path that we want it to take up Pikes Peak,” Gerdes says.

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