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!
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