Meta’s AI division has been busy in recent months finding ways to make concrete production more sustainable and machine translation better. Now one of the company’s ML teams has created a tool that builds realistic simulations of the musculoskeletal system that are up to 4,000 times faster than state-of-the-art prosthetics. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company can train the models to do things like spin pens and rotate objects.
At the moment, Meta sees the usefulness of the platform in two different ways. For starters, there’s the obvious metaverse angle. Zuckerberg suggests MyoSuite could help the company develop more realistic avatars for applications like Horizon Worlds. Another more interesting use case could be for researchers to use the platform to develop new prosthetics, as well as new surgical and rehabilitation techniques. To that end, Meta says it plans to make the model open source.
Meta is not the first company to think of using AI to improve prosthetics. In 2019, an independent team of researchers created a machine learning system that allowed them to quickly tailor a robotic knee to an individual patient. That same year, Intel unveiled a “neuromorphic” deep-learning chip that the company said would make prosthetic limbs more efficient.
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