Zurich is hosting the world’s first “Cyborg Olympics”

The debut of the world’s first competition for disabled athletes using bionic assistive technology, known as the Cybathlon, begins in Zurich, Switzerland, on October 10^th . According to the event’s website, Cybathlon involves the physically disabled working with the newest technology in six disciplines. “Although people are at the center of our event, technology also plays a relatively large role,” said event founder and ETH Zurich Professor Robert Riener.

The competition differs from regular sporting events by allowing the presence of technology that traditional sports usually prohibit. Without these restrictions, the Cybathlon events can display strengths and weaknesses of these assistive tools in tests of accuracy, agility, and ease of use. Some of these tests include a powered arm prosthesis race, a powered exoskeleton race, and a powered wheelchair race. Through these challenging yet entertaining obstacles, the event committee hopes to both unite tech developers and disabled people and make robotic tools more accessible to people.

Companies are supplying only a partial amount of the technical equipment to be used in races. Competition teams (groups that work in university research labs) are supplying the majority of necessities, including mobility-impaired participants and prototype-level mobility devices. Teams exist for each specific field covered by the event, focusing on a topic like specific prosthetic body parts and exoskeletons.

In addition to the Cybathlon being an entirely new idea, its races present some unprecedented technology. The brain-computer interface (BCI) race requires participants to guide an avatar through virtual obstacles courses with their brains. BCI, which gathers brain signals and translates them into electrical signals which eventually become digital output, is a rapidly growing technology targeted at restoring functions for those with cerebral palsy or spinal cord injury, among other conditions. While rigs can use EEGs or near-IR spectroscopy in the BCI race, participants can’t use anything else other than their minds to drive the avatar and win the race. 

The Cybathlon also contains courses that align with elements found in daily life, as prosthetics should easily help their users participate in typical settings. While users may not regularly have to face a stepping-stone pathway that is simulated in one of the courses, the situation allows them to see how they would handle the scenario with their prosthetics.  

Promoting this bond behind the physical activity and technology is ultimately the key to making advances in the prosthetic field. “We are allowing ‘techno-doping’ to deliver the best possible assistance for paralyzed humans, thus trying to improve their quality of life,” Riener told ArsTechnica.

Source: ExtremeTech, US National Library of Medicine, ETH Zurich, ArsTechnica