FORTY years ago, the bionic man and woman were just cheesy TV shows; tomorrow, they could be your neighbors. Over the last few years, the ability to augment our bodies using technology has grown at a mind-blowing rate. Thanks to tech, our future selves will likely be smarter, stronger, more mobile, and possibly immortal.

    Most of these technologies are being developed to help people with critical medical needs; in the future, though, they could become optional upgrades for healthy humans. Some of these devices are still years away, but some are here today.

    Here’s what your future body may look like.

    1. Upgrade your memory

    Last fall, DARPA of the United States announced plans to develop a “wireless, fully implantable neural-interface medical device” to help victims of traumatic brain injury. These chips, called Restoring Active Memory (RAM), aim to identify how the brain stores memories and then replicate them digitally. Soon, you may no longer have an excuse for forgetting your spouse’s birthday.

    2. The broadband brain

    Another DARPA initiative, called Neural Engineering System Design, aims to create a high-speed interface that will enable digital devices to communicate with up to a million neurons at a time. This could allow for much higher-resolution visual and auditory signals to reach optic or cochlear implants, or enable EEGs to collect brain wave data using thousands of channels instead of 100.

    3. Bionic eyes

    Last June, surgeons in the United Kingdom installed the first “bionic” retina in a patient suffering from age-related macular degeneration. The device receives signals from a camera embedded in a pair of glasses, sending a partial image to a receiver attached to the optic nerve. Meanwhile, Verily (formerly Google’s life sciences division) is developing a smart contact lens that measures the glucose levels in your tears and another that automatically corrects presbyopia.

    4. Super hearing

    In 2013, researchers at Princeton cooked up a 3-D printed ear made from cartilage and electronics that could pick up frequencies a million times higher than human ears. Until that’s ready for prime time, we’ll have to make do with devices like Doppler Labs’ Here Active Listening — a US$200 earbud that lets you filter out frequencies you don’t want to hear, like elevator music or a crying baby.

    5. 3-D-printed bones

    Blow out your kneecap or break your hip? Here, let us print you a new one. So far, doctors have used 3-D printing techniques to create replacement knees, hip joints, jawbones — even skulls — and successfully implant them into humans.

    6. Lab-grown organs

    Researchers are working on similar 3-D-printing technology to grow hearts, lungs, kidneys, and livers in the lab, using a recipient’s own stem cells to ensure perfectly compatible replacements. Though lab-grown human transplants are still many years away, this technique could eventually supplant contributions from organ donors as a way to prolong human lives.

    7. Digital arms and legs

    In June 2014, researchers at Johns Hopkins attached the first mind-controled artificial arms — prosthetics that could respond directly to signals from the brain — to a 59-year-old double amputee. The devices contain more than 100 sensors, which could theoretically restore physical sensations to the limbs. Last May, Icelandic prosthetic manufacturer Ossur produced a similar smart replacement for legs.

    8. Magnetic fingertips and glow-in-the-dark skin

    Self-proclaimed biohackers are implanting electronics under their skin. Why? Apparently, tattoos and piercings are just not painful enough. Subcutaneous magnets inserted in one’s fingers allow their owners to detect minute magnetic fields (and, presumably, rescue small metallic objects from tight spaces). LED lights implanted in the fatty tissue of the epidermis don’t do anything practical, but look cool in a Robocop kind of way.

    9. Super-human strength

    Ekso Bionics’ wearable, battery-powered exo-skeleton can restore mobility to people who have limited control over their lower extremities. Cyberdyne’s Hybrid Assistive Lab (HAL) suit, which allows healthy people to carry up to 10 times more weight than they normally could, is already in use in Japan.

    10. Digital immortality

    Instead of putting technology into different organs in your body, some companies want to put your organs into tech. For example: Australian startup Humai Tech hopes to take your brain, freeze it after you die, and (at some future date) pop it back into a cybernetic organism with all of your memories and personality intact. Its goal is to achieve the first brain-to-cyborg transfer by the year 2045.

    (SD-Agencies)