Blind people look with tongues

A British soldier lost his eyes due to grenades in Iraq, but his life changed thanks to a breakthrough technology that helps blind people visualize everything around with their tongues.

Craig Lundberg was the first British to use the BrainPort device.Photo: Telegraph .

Telegraph said, veteran Craig Lundberg, 24, lives in Liverpool, England. During his service in Basra, Iraq in 2007 he was blinded by the explosion of a grenade. That disaster could make Lundberg make friends with a cane or guide dog for the rest of his life.

But fate was smiling at Lundberg when the Ministry of Defense decided to choose him as the first to test an unprecedented machine in the world called BrainPort. This device can open a new era in the treatment of blind people.

BrainPort includes a 15 mm diameter motion sensor camera, a pair of sunglasses, a control device and a tiny 400 electrode electrode blade. The camera is placed on sunglasses and has a thin cable to connect to the user tongue. The end of the string is the tongue pad.

Images from the camera are transmitted to the control device to be converted into electrical impulses. Control device transmits electrical impulses to the tip of the blade through electrode pads. Each electrical pulse has a different intensity and the electrodes on the blade pads can determine the strength of each pulse. Based on the intensity difference between the pulses that the nerve endings at the tip of the tongue help users visualize the surroundings. The nerves of the tongue are very sensitive and can transmit large amounts of information at the same time.

The control device, which is about the size of a mobile phone, allows users to zoom in and out "images" in the brain, adjust light parameters and electrical pulse intensity.

"Every time I take a piece of tongue, I feel like I am sucking a small piece of candy or a battery. Based on the signals that the camera sends to the tongue liner you can determine their meaning and visualize the shape of all. things around , " explained Lundberg.

Lundberg said he could feel the shapes of objects in two-dimensional space. Of course, they appeared in his mind with black and white. Now veterans can locate objects and pick them up easily.

The Brainport device has the ability to convert light into electrical impulses to transmit to the tongue.Photo: gizmowatch.com.

According to the Telegraph, BrainPort is the invention of researchers of the Wicab company in the US. In the 1960s, Paul Bach-y-Rita, the famous American neurologist and founder of Wicab, gave a shocking hypothesis: People do not see with their eyes, but rather. Brain. According to his hypothesis, the eyes only provide external light signals. Now, with BrainPort, scientists have proved the correctness of Paul Bach-y-Rita's theory.

The researchers said they wanted to increase the number of electrical pulses on the tongue pad to a figure of 4,000 to make the image that the "blind" see would become clearer. Since users cannot eat when using BrainPort, the inventors hope they will shrink the size of the tongue pads so that users can attach it to the back of the tooth or the palate.

The Ministry of Defense announced it would pay US scientists about $ 25,000 for each BrainPort. Extensive equipment testing for blind soldiers will be carried out in the near future.