FreeLook BookStore

Some Not-So-Trivial News!

New Research Gives Sightless Persons a Taste of Things Visual
       bbbb:w "Blind workers fill assembly-line jobs." "Blind test subjects bat a ball from off an inclined plane." Those are not science fiction headlines — those are facts! A not-trivial article that appeared in the September 1, 2001, issue of Science News reported that researchers have been working for years on aiding "vision" in subjects who have been blind since birth. Doctors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed devices that translate images from a special camera into "a pattern of electric pulses that trigger touch receptors." And with practice, the brain can learn to interpret those tactile signals as visual signals.
        Earlier studies had used touch-stimulating arrays on the back and abdomen, says Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, one of the inventors these devices. But newer, more effective equipment sends stimuli to what appears to be the best non-visual vision-receiving site -- the tongue!
        The work still has a long way to go. Subjects' best score of visual acuity is still only 20/430, while the cutoff for legal blindness is 20/200 with corrected vision. (And normal vision is 20/20, of course.) But researchers expect that the day is not far off when sightless persons will be able to slip in a receiver about the size of a dental retainer, put on a data sender disguised as a pair of eye glasses and walk out of the lab to enjoy a relatively "sighted" life!

Back to the Trivial News

Copyright © 2001 FreeLook BookStore. All rights reserved.