Becoming bionic one piece at a time

So I saw an ad the other night for a new show coming out this season. Actually it is a remake of a remake of a spin off. The show is the “Bionic Woman”. I guess they wanted the sexier version so did that instead of bringing back Lee Majors. This is kind of funny to me as the original show was on the air in 1976 and was followed up in 1987 and 1989 with return of movies. Now in 2007 they are re-imagining the show. That is the new word for re-making I guess. I don’t really know anything about it, I only saw a commercial. But I was thinking about how far in the last 31 years we have come to actually creating bionic people. Bionics are actually here, today. Many amputees are starting to get prosthetics that can have up to a dozen functions. To grab, rotate, lift, angle, etc. around different joints. This is far from the show but also much more sophisticated than anything in real life back in the 70s. Beyond that people are starting to interface themselves with computers more and more.

These interfaces may not be implanted like in Sci-Fi movies and TV but that are just as effect. For instance look how many people carry around portable computers? Then how many people use Blue tooth head sets. Some people also carry around a portable gps to get directions. In fact in the last couple of year you could get all of this in one device. My new work phone is an example of this. It is always connected to the internet via wi-fi or the cell network, handles calls, has a Bluetooth ear piece, has a music player, can interface with a gps, connects me to 3 email accounts, and keeps my calendar synchronized with Outlook. Similar to this I have seen in many magazines glasses that can also display a screen projection and watches that monitor your vitals and report back via Bluetooth to a computer. So even beyond prosthetics people seem to becoming bionic one piece at a time.

How long then before we could actually create a “Six Million Dollar Man”, and would we also get the cool sound effects? What I find interesting is that if you combine the consumer side of things with the medical side of things we really aren’t that far. We can replace bones with titanium, have basic robotic prosthetics that can be controlled by the brain, and have devices that are phones/computers/GPSs/entertainment systems/medical monitors. Not only that but we are starting to build portable replacements for our internal organs. So if you put all of this together on one person you have the basics of a bionic person. I started thinking about this when I got my new phone, then more when I saw a special about some new prosthetics, but really we are extremely close to what Sci-Fi was thinking 30 years ago. I wonder where we’ll be in another 30.