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A British veteran blinded in Afghanistan is set to wear an experimental device that helps the blind "see" through electrical stimulation of the tongue.

Dubbed the BrainPort, the device creates an image of the external world -- through touch. A stainless steel mouthpiece outfitted with 400 ports, nicknamed the "lollipop," fits over the tongue. A small camera attached to sunglasses feeds live video into the lollipop, which then delivers electric signals through its many ports onto the tongue, creating a streaming, "tactile" representation of whatever is recorded by the camera.

"The tongue is the ideal site, because it has such great electrical conductivity," Robert Beckman, CEO of Wicab, the Middleton, Wis.-based makers of the device, tells DOTmed Business News. "It's constantly moist, there's a number of nerve endings on the tongue. It's great for displaying images on the body."

Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Gale Pollock, who heads the Fox Center for Vision Restoration, a research partnership with the University of Pittsburgh, the UPMC and the McGowan Institute, and who is helping to conduct studies of the device with military veterans, among others, says the electrical stimulation of the tongue is painless and feels like "champagne bubbles" or "Pop Rocks."




The science behind the technology, called sensory substitution - replacing one sensory modality with another, in this case, sight with touch - dates back to the 1960s, and was developed by the late psychologist Paul Bach-y-Rita, the founder of Wicab. But only now the "current capabilities of computers and electronics have made a practical portable device" possible, says Beckman.

Studies using a prototype of the BrainPort conducted several years ago by Maurice Ptito, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, found that blind patients using the device actually processed the tactile stimulation in the part of their brain that governs visual inputs -- suggesting that a kind of sensory substitution was indeed taking place.

Currently, Beckman says patients using the device are only able to "resolve" gross details, no finer than picking out a golf ball sitting on a table. However, he notes that the goal is not to restore sight, but to improve quality-of-life for the blind. "We have to stay away from the concept of re-creating vision - that's a mistake," he says. "We have to work on improving perception for blind people."

As for the difficulty of learning how to interpret electric pulses on the tongue as a moving image, Pollock says it takes six to eight hours to begin to perceive if a door is open, but it could take months, or longer, to truly use it fluently.

"It's like learning the alphabet, or learning to read," she says. "First we have to recognize the letter, then we have to make them into sentences. It takes us a while to make them into paragraphs and pages."




While most experiments involving the device have only lasted a number of hours, in June, a 32-year-old American marine whose eyes were removed after sustaining heavy combat injuries in Iraq was the first person to take the device home and try it for several weeks.

"What he discovered for us, is it's very helpful for sedentary circumstances," says Pollock, "or if you're moving slowly. Is that door open or closed? Is there someone standing here I'm going to bang into? In a relatively confined space, it works well. But when he's trying to race down the street at Marine Corps speed," it's not as effective, she says. Pollock hopes software upgrades -- developed from feedback given by the marine -- will prove useful in making BrainPort better on-the-go.

Mobility in new environments is the main aim of the product, according to Beckman, and the advantage he hopes it will bring over other aids for the blind, such as seeing-eye dogs. "[If you're] navigating in an unknown area -- maybe in an unknown office building," he says, "[and if you're] told to find the third office door on the left, with a seeing eye dog that's difficult, if it has never been there before." But he thinks it would be no problem for a trained user of the BrainPort.

Beckman hopes to qualify the BrainPort for 510(k) clearance, and will submit clinical evidence of its effectiveness to the FDA by the end of the month. It is already approved for use in Canada and Europe.

The company also manufactures a similar device intended to help people with balance problems. "The media focus on the vision thing," says Beckman, "but commercially, the balance is the driver," as more Americans suffer from vestibular disorders than total vision loss.