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divinefurball
USA
138 Posts |
 Posted - May 17 2009 : 10:40:12 AM
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Interesting article with significance for future understanding of how Kechari might work:
SAT., MAY 16, 2009 - 10:59 PM
Seeing with your tongue
By RON SEELY
608-252-6131
rseely@madison.com
Roger Behm lost his sight at 16, the victim of an inherited disease that destroyed his retinas. Both of his eyes were surgically removed.
Now 55, Behm has made himself at home in a sightless world. He started his own business in Janesville selling devices that help the blind cope with day-to-day tasks. He and his wife have raised five children and just adopted another child from China who is also blind. He fishes, canoes, camps and scuba dives.
But Behm can remember seeing. Which is why he couldn’t believe it when, three years ago, he slipped a device over his head, turned it on, and was once again able to discern light and dark, shapes and shadows, letters and numbers, and even a rolling golf ball.
• To learn more about BrainPort and Wicab, Inc. go to the company’s site
• Erik Weihenmayer's page
• For more on sensory substitution, see this article from The Why Files
• GRAPHIC: How the technology works
"I could look down and and see the ball, white on black, and I could see myself swinging my putter," Behm said. "And, of course, I missed. But I could reach down and pick up my ball, like any other sighted person."
The device is called BrainPort and, though it seems like a gadget from Star Trek, it may be available commercially by the end of the year.
It works by converting images from a video camera to electrical impulses that are transmitted via the tongue to the brain of the blind person and turned again into black-and-white images that the user sees.
It takes advantage of groundbreaking work by a UW-Madison scientist that showed the brain will reprogram itself to accept and use different sensory signals — in this case touch instead of sight — to replace signals that can no longer be received due to injury or disease.
The device, which consists of a miniature camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses, a tongue sensor and a small control unit, was developed by Wicab of Middleton. It builds on another of the company’s devices that uses the same underlying ideas to help restore users’ balance.
The company is applying to the federal Food and Drug Administration to get approval for a marketable version of the vision device that could be available by the end of the year, Wicab CEO Robert Beckman said.
Trying circumstances
Few have tested BrainPort under more trying circumstances than Erik Weihenmayer, the only blind man to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Weihenmayer, totally blind since the age of 16, has used the device to help him hike in the woods, even ascend climbing walls. But he has most appreciated it for letting him do such simple but rewarding tasks as playing tic-tac-toe with his daughter or reaching down to pet his dog.
"I have a climbing friend who didn’t believe me when I told him about this," Weihenmayer said. "So he put a Pepsi can on my table in my kitchen while I was out of the room. Then he called me back in and told me to grab it. I reached out and grabbed the Pepsi can. He was blown away. He was speechless. He had tears in his eyes.
"I mean, it may not seem like a real big deal to people, but to be able to see your coffee cup ... ."
Neither Behm nor Weihenmayer are paid consultants to Wicab, although the company pays some of their expenses.
The late Paul Bach-y-Rita, a UW-Madison physician and specialist in rehabilitation, first came up with the ideas that inspired BrainPort in the 1960s. The technology was patented by UW-Madison in 1998, and commercial development has been under way for more than 10 years.
New ways to work
Bach-y-Rita’s earliest thinking about the brain’s ability to adapt to new ways of receiving and processing information — its "plasticity," as it is known now — was likely sparked by the dramatic struggle of his father, Pedro, to recover from a devastating stroke in the mid-1960s, Beckman said.
Neurologists in those days believed brain damage could not be reversed. But Bach-y-Rita’s brother, George, soon put their father to work doing chores such as sweeping the porch of the house. Forced to accomplish more and more difficult tasks, their father eventually recovered completely and even went back to his job teaching.
He died at the age of 73 of a heart attack while climbing in the mountains of Columbia.
Remarkably, studies of Pedro’s brain after his death showed massive damage to his brain from the stroke. Yet he recovered. Somehow, his brain had found new ways to work.
At the UW-Madison, Bach-y-Rita focused his studies on sensory substitution, the idea that the brain can learn how to use other senses to replace one that has been lost or damaged. He concentrated on the power of touch, studying what happens in the brain when visual cues come from the sensitive nerves of the skin, such as those on the fingertips.
Perfect organ
Those studies buttressed others that showed the brain can indeed learn how to use nerve impulses, delivered through touch, to create images. Exactly what happens remains somewhat of a mystery. But more recently, MRI images taken of the brain while it is working do show the visual cortex of the brain lighting up when receiving sensory data retrieved through touch.
"The information does get to the area of the brain that is responsible for vision," said Kurt Kaczmarek, a UW-Madison engineer and scientist who was involved in the early work on BrainPort.
The tongue is the perfect organ for the task, Beckman said, because it is moist and an excellent transmitter of electrical signals, and it has more tactile nerve endings than any other part of the body except for the lips.
Though one can read the science over and over again, it still requires somewhat of a leap of faith to grasp the idea of "seeing" through the tongue. Simply, the patterns of light picked up by the camera are converted by a tiny computer into electrical pulses across 100 stainless steel electrodes. Users say it feels similar to touching a weak battery to your tongue, a bubbly or tingling sensation.
The pulses are spatially encoded, meaning the person receiving those signals on the tongue can perceive depth, perspective, size and shape. That information is translated by the brain into images — fuzzy images, because of the low resolution, but images nonetheless. Those who have used the device explain that they perceive the objects in front of them, separate from their own bodies.
A milestone of sorts
Weihenmayer recalled how when he first tried BrainPort, the researchers sat him down at a table, fitted him with the device, and then rolled a ball toward him.
"It’s a hard thing to wrap your brain around," said Weihenmayer. "But when they rolled a white tennis ball toward me, I could feel the ball rolling. First I could feel the ball starting at the back of my tongue and getting bigger and bigger, coming toward me. And then I reached out and grabbed it."
When he ascends a rock climbing wall with BrainPort, Weihenmayer said, he can see the handholds, their differences in shape and the contrast in light between them and the background. What he sees, he explained, is largely shapes and light variations, sort of an out-of-focus image.
Last month, Weihenmayer joined Beckman at the National Eye Institute’s 40th anniversary celebration to demonstrate BrainPort and some of its powers. It seemed a milestone of sorts.
But the man whose genius led to the creation of such a useful invention was not present. Bach-y-Rita died of cancer in November of 2006.
"He would have loved to have been there," said Beckman.
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Scott
USA
969 Posts |
Posted - May 17 2009 : 1:35:15 PM
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Really awesome.
However, the website doesn't discuss the second sight phenomenon at all...I wonder why? They say it's "for training patients with balance deficits due to chronic vestibular disorders. The device provides information about head position through electrotactile stimulation of the tongue."
http://wicab.us/technology/
I wonder why? |
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Seeing With The Tongue
