A new tactile sensing carpet from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) can estimate human poses without using cameras, in a step towards  improving self-powered personalized healthcare, smart homes, and gaming.

The confluence of medicine and artificial intelligence stands to create truly high-performance, specialized care for patients, with enhanced precision diagnosis and personalized disease management.

MIT researchers have now designed a sharp-tipped robot finger equipped with tactile sensing to meet the challenge of identifying buried objects. In experiments, the aptly named Digger Finger was able to dig through granular media such as sand and rice, and it correctly sensed the shapes of submerged items it encountered.

Robotic arm equipped with a hairbrush helps with brushing tasks and could be an asset in assistive-care settings. 

A study from MIT shows how coronavirus skeptics have marshalled data visualizations online to argue against public health orthodoxy about the benefits of mask mandates. Such “counter-visualizations” are often quite sophisticated, using datasets from official sources and state-of-the-art visualization methods.