[blindza] Seeing with your tongue
- From: "Jacob Kruger" <jacobk@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "BlindZA" <blindza@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 13:42:20 +0200
Seems like this brain port thing will be commercially available a lot sooner
that initially thought.
(see below)
Jacob Kruger
Blind Biker
Skype: BlindZA
'...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...'
---article content---
Seeing with your tongue.
By RON SEELY, 608-252-6131, rseely@xxxxxxxxxxx
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.
"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.
Source URL:
http://www.madison.com/wsj/topstories/451
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