GPS-Enabled Shoes to Help Track Down Grandpa

GPS-Enabled Shoes to Help Track Down Grandpa

  10:06:00 AM    Science Lover

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The next frontier for GPS? Footwear for those suffering from Alzheimer's.

New GPS-enabled shoes are meant to provide safety and security for all walks of life.

Shoes with built-in GPS could be coming to a store near you this month. AFP reports that 3,000 of the shoes, a collaboration between GTX Corp and Aetrex Worldwide, have shipped and will retail at about $300 per pair.

What, exactly, you may wonder, is a possible use case for a GPS-enabled shoe? There are several, apparently.

MSNBC reports that another effort, from something called "The Aphrodite Project" (URL: SexyGpsShoes.com) involves GPS-equipped sandals intended to keep prostitutes safe. "Our first shoe...was inspired by the prostitutes of ancient Greece and Rome, who enticed clients with their flutes and sandals that left 'follow me' footprints in the earth," write the founders of The Aphrodite Project.

Another use case could be for missing children: GTX Corp first got the idea for the shoes, reportedly, in the wake of the 2002 Elizabeth Smart case. The idea was that if a child were kidnapped or wandered off while wearing the GPS shoes, you could easily track him or her down. Call it a digitally enabled AMBER alert.

Eventually, GTX Corp and Aetrex came to settle on another "use case" entirely: the Alzheimer's patient. Those suffering from early-stage Alzheimer's will often wander off and become lost or confused. "They go for a walk and they can get lost for days," Andrew Carle, a professor of Health and Human Services at George Mason College (and an adviser on the GPS shoe project), told AFP. It is, sadly, a growth market. Five million Americans have Alzheimer's; as many as 20 million may come to suffer from it in the near future. The majority of Alzheimer's patients exhibit wandering behavior at some point; if not found within a few days, these sufferers can become severely injured or even die from dehydration.

Much like with similar technologies that allow you to essentially helicopter parent your pet, the GTX/Aetrex shoe allows caretakers or family members to set up a geofence for safe wandering; if the wearer strays beyond the geofence, an alert will go out. But aren't there easier ways to get a GPS unit on a senior? Carle claimed that paranoia often prevents Alzheimer's patients from wearing, say, a wristwatch with a GPS unit. "If it's a wristwatch and it's not their wristwatch," he said, "they will take it off. So you have to hide it."

It isn't the first time caretakers have resorted to a bit of ingenuity to aid in caring for those with Alzheimer's. Listen, for example, to this amazing story care of Radiolab about a German nursing home that built a fake bus stop to convince its wandering Alzheimer's sufferers to simply sit and wait.

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Scientists Turn Memories Off and On With Flip of Switch

Scientists Turn Memories Off and On With Flip of Switch

  8:10:00 PM    Science Lover

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Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off -- literally with the flip of a switch. Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget.

In the experiment, the researchers had rats learn a task, 
pressing one lever rather than another to receive a reward. 
Using embedded electrical probes, the experimental research 
team recorded changes in the rat's brain activity between 
the two major internal divisions of the hippocampus, known 
as subregions CA3 and CA1. The experimenters then blocked 
the normal neural interactions between the two areas using 
pharmacological agents. The previously trained rats then 
no long displayed the long-term learned behavior. But long-
term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically 
blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device 
programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function. 
(Credit: USC Viterbi School of Engineering)

"Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget," said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Berger is the lead author of an article that will be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. His team worked with scientists from Wake Forest University in the study, building on recent advances in our understanding of the brain area known as the hippocampus and its role in learning.



In the experiment, the researchers had rats learn a task, pressing one lever rather than another to receive a reward. Using embedded electrical probes, the experimental research team, led by Sam A. Deadwyler of the Wake Forest Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, recorded changes in the rat's brain activity between the two major internal divisions of the hippocampus, known as subregions CA3 and CA1. During the learning process, the hippocampus converts short-term memory into long-term memory, the researchers prior work has shown.

"No hippocampus," says Berger, "no long-term memory, but still short-term memory." CA3 and CA1 interact to create long-term memory, prior research has shown.

In a dramatic demonstration, the experimenters blocked the normal neural interactions between the two areas using pharmacological agents. The previously trained rats then no longer displayed the long-term learned behavior.

"The rats still showed that they knew 'when you press left first, then press right next time, and vice-versa,'" Berger said. "And they still knew in general to press levers for water, but they could only remember whether they had pressed left or right for 5-10 seconds."

Using a model created by the prosthetics research team led by Berger, the teams then went further and developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the pattern of interaction between CA3-CA1 interactions.

Long-term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function.

In addition, the researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device and its associated electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability of normal rats.

"These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes," says the paper.

Next steps, according to Berger and Deadwyler, will be attempts to duplicate the rat results in primates (monkeys), with the aim of eventually creating prostheses that might help the human victims of Alzheimer's disease, stroke or injury recover function.

The paper is entitled "A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory." Besides Deadwyler and Berger, the other authors are, from USC, BME Professor Vasilis Z. Marmarelis and Research Assistant Professor Dong Song, and from Wake Forest, Associate Professor Robert E. Hampson and Post-Doctoral Fellow Anushka Goonawardena.

Berger, who holds the David Packard Chair in Engineering, is the Director of the USC Center for Neural Engineering, Associate Director of the National Science Foundation Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems Engineering Research Center, and a Fellow of the IEEE, the AAAS, and the AIMBE

"A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory." (Berger et al 2011 J. Neural Eng. 8 046017)

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