Scott Novich and David Eagleman, neuroscientists at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, are developing a device that relies on sensory substitution, which involves feeding information from one sense into another. -For example, a New York-based company called Tactile Navigation Tools is creating a vest that can transform spatial information into vibrations to aid blind people. A microphone on the vest captures sounds from the environment and feeds them into an Android tablet or smartphone, which extracts the audio relevant to speech and converts it into unique patterns of vibration in about two dozen tiny buzzers (similar to the ones found in a cellphone). They compared two different algorithms for translating words into vibration. The researchers are still collecting data, but preliminary results suggest that both the deaf and hearing participants can learn to interpret spoken words as patterns of vibration on the skin.



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