by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | September 16, 2009
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."
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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.
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