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On the Origin of the Biohack Species #exsum13

Sogeti Labs
October 08, 2013

DSC_0118Out of the box and straight into your body! At the Sogeti Executive Summit 2013, Tim Cannon, co-founder of Grindhouse Wetware, demonstrated in person how the relation between humans and ‘things’ is changing. To the extent that both categories easily can be merged into a new species with true extrasensory capacities. Practical transhumanism in the making. Grindhouse is not into nanotechnology or advanced synthetic biology, but simply in anatomy, electrical engineering, and programming. With imagination and drive, anyone can feel and touch EMF fields, explore their contours, sense the temperature of objects across a room, navigate a room using a sonar sense, or even connect their body to the Internet. Grindhouse Wetware was founded January 2012, by a group of programmers, engineers, and enthusiasts. In the months thereafter, Grindhouse evolved from a bunch of highly driven individuals on the biohack.me forums, to a dedicated team working towards a common goal: augmenting humanity using safe, affordable, open source technology. Grindhouse implants and cyberware allow the user to reconfigure code, add on or take off sensors, and generally explore. Circadia Circadia is an implantable device that can read biomedical data and transmit it to the Internet via bluetooth. Instead of taking snapshots of your health by visiting a doctor, you can aggregate weeks or months of medical data that you can store for your personal viewing. Messages, warnings, or texts from your android phone to Circadia implant can be displayed via LEDs through your skin. Bottlenose v0.1 The Bottlenose takes in a large range of data such as sonar, UV, wi-fi and thermal information and translates it to a magnetic field via induction where it interacts with an implanted magnet (usually in the finger). Grindhouse also provides a haptic version of the Bottlenose, which does not require a magnet implant. The haptic model vibrates with varying intensity in the presence of sensory information. Any sensor can be substituted or added to the provided kit. Thinking Cap v1.0 The Thinking Cap is the first major release of Grindhouse Wetware’s implementation of the tDCS (transcranial Direct Current Stimulation) and CES (Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation) concepts. The idea is to stimulate your brain with direct current or with square waves of current which can either raise or lower the potential energy of the stimulated neurons, depending on the orientation of electrodes. This allows them to fire more or less easily, and activates or deactivates a given region, thus engaging certain brain states. The tDCS setting uses a current source and PWM to ramp up the current at the beginning, and ramp it back down after a given stimulation time (20 minutes by default, but this setting is also changeable). The CES setting pulls a constant square wave, with a frequency to be set by the user. Beware: pulling currents in excess of 2 mA is not recommended for any use!

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SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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