by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | September 16, 2009
Woman outfitted
with the BrainPort
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."
Images recorded by the camera
are translated into electrial pulses
on the tongue
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."
