The Archelis is a ‘wearable chair’ designed for professionals who cannot afford to take a seat, unless they take it along with them, like surgeons working around an operating table.

Consider any job that involves a lot of standing or walking, like a barista at a coffee shop or bartender at the pub or painter at his easel. Even an everyday commuter on the busy subway could benefit.

The device wraps around a user’s legs, looking like an integrated pair of braces, but locking into position to provide support on demand, even while the user is effectively half-standing.

There are a lot of potential other applications as well, for elderly or infirm persons, but also perhaps, as they are further refined (less bulky), simply for everyday use, letting us all walk around and ‘sit’ whenever we want.

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A step beyond conventional corrective eyewear, the Ocumetics Bionic Lens, invented by Dr. Garth Webb of Ocumetics Technology Corp, is a painless implant that can give patients the ability to see beyond the normal scope of 20/20 (perfect) vision.

The results were presented at a cataract and refractive surgery conference after years of research, experimentation and iteration, funded to the tune of $3,000,000 for research, patents, tests and trials. The procedure for implanting these, however, is much faster: just eight minutes in a chair.

The lens is not just an overlay but a surgical implant, attaching to the actual lens of the eye. Vision is completely corrected as soon as the installation is complete. Further, the implant helps protect eyes against future cataracts by defending it against decay and is touted to be safer than laser eye surgery. Its creators hope the lenses will be out and on the market by 2017.

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It may only be a matter of time before people begin replacing body parts with bionic alternatives that do all of the same things and more, and in a ay it has already begun: these three patients had their limbs severed and prosthetics added to increase their functionality.

The individuals in this case all had nerve damage between the nerves of their spines and hands, resulting in mostly or entirely paralyzed limbs – with no potential for recovery, the choice to replace simply made the most sense.

These ‘bionic reconstruction’ surgeries were executed by Oskar Aszmann at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Grafted muscle relays translate signals from the patients’ brains to their artificial limbs. The new hands need to be powered to function properly and are recharged each night. These bionic enhancements are still not as capable as ordinary hands, but it may not be too long before they are. For now, they can perform simple but powerful tasks, like picking up and holding objects, pressing buttons and gripping surfaces.

Per NewScientist: “Before the operation, Aszmann’s patients had to prepare their bodies and brains. First he transplanted leg muscle into their arms to boost the signal from the remaining nerve fibres. Three months later, after the nerves had grown into the new muscle, the men started training their brains. First they practised activating the muscle using an armband of sensors that picked up on the electrical activity. Then they moved on to controlling a virtual arm. Finally, Aszmann amputated their hands, and replaced them with a standard prosthesis under the control of the muscle and sensors.”

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At age 30, Valery Spiridonov is wasting away thanks to the progressive deterioration of his body – a terminal disease that will kill him sooner or later, leaving him few alternatives to an unorthodox procedure: a full body transplant.

Surgeon Sergio Canavero has already made waves by proposing such a possibility was not too far off in the future, and now he has a patient willing to give the surgery a shot.

A physically-living but brain-dead patient is needed, and polyethylene glycol to facilitate the reconnection of spinal chords – semi-successful variants on this have been achieved with other species, but never with people, at least not to date.

This patient knows the risks, too. “Am I afraid? Yes, of course I am. But it is not just very scary but also very interesting … you have to understand that I don’t really have many choices. I am now 30 years old, although people rarely live to more than 20 with this disease.” The surgery will cost millions and has raised skepticism in the medical community, but for someone with no alternatives, any chance may be better than none at all.

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A brand new human life may just have been saved thanks to the combined technologies of MRI and 3D printing. Dr. Emile Bacha, a surgeon at Morgan Stanley Hospital in Manhattan, used a novel technique to operate on a two-week-old baby with congenital heart defects (CHD). Ordinarily, surgery to repair complicated heart deformations would require opening up the patient’s chest and stopping the heart just to study the defects of that specific heart before they can even begin repairing it.

Each heart with CHD has its own set of holes, and with non-invasive imaging techniques it’s difficult to map out exactly what will need to be fixed during surgery. Dr. Bacha and his team took MRI images of the baby’s heart and used them to create a 3D map of the organ. They then studied it in detail and practiced on the 3D printed replica. They knew exactly what to do before they even began the operation.

Dr. Bacha described the 3D printed heart as a “road map” repairing the maze that was the abnormal heart. Rather than opening up the chest to study the heart and then later performing a second operation to repair it, they were able to accomplish the life-saving surgery in just one operation. This type of achievement is just one example of how 3D printing is already changing the world. For the tiny patient’s family, the ready availability of 3D printing technology literally changed their lives forever.

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