Articles

[Ms. Kathy]

Ms. W. Williams, a teacher at one of my schools sent this interesting article from the 11/8/04 issue of Peopleabout Dans Le Noir? (In the dark) Restaurant in Paris. There is a similar one in Germany. I have since found the web sites for each of these places which I will post in the web sites list section. I'd love to hear from you if you've ever experienced one of these restaurants!

What's It Like to Be Blind? Guests at a Paris Hot Spot Are Lining UP to Find Out

PEOPLE'S Cathy Nolan goes behind the curtain to experience dining in the dark

For an American in Paris, entering a snooty French restaurant can be intimidating. But as I walk into the new hot spot Dans Le Noir?--it means "in the dark"--I feel more like I'm preparing for a bungee jump: The dining room is pitch black. As in no lights, no candles, not even an emergency exit sign. Will I be able to find my food? What is it like to be blind? I am about to find out.

When I arrive at the sold-out restaurant, I find to my relief that the bar is fully lit. A maitre d' (who can see asks me to put my hands on the shoulders of my "guide-server" Carole )a member of the all-blind wait staff). "I like that we are sharing our experience," she tells me. Carole leads me through three sets of curtains into a dining room as black as the bottom of a mine shaft. I hear restaurant sounds: forks clinking, conversation. But I can't see a thing, and I'm feeling discombobulated. Carole reassuringly guides me to my seat and tells me how to fill my glass--by keeping one finger in it so you know when it's full. One diner freaks out. "I can't do it," she says, and is helped to the door. She's one of about 10 guests to do that so far.

Later the 42-year-old owner, a biusinessman named Edouard de Broglie, explains that he opend Dans Le Noir? on July 14 to expose sighted people to the world of the blind. "It wakes the other senses," he says. He's right. My sense of hearing and touch feel like they've been jolted with caffeine. But when my fish arrives (bones are removed in the kitchen), the meal pleasant but indistinct. Is that a carrot I'm chewing? I start to feel helpless--even scared. I skip the dessert. As I pay my $50 check back in the well-lit bar ("One thing that we won't ever try to do," jokes the manager Alain Mazoyer, "is settle the bill in the dark"), I'm feeling relieved but exhilarated. I'll come back to Dans Le Noir? again, but next time with a good friend.

[Ms. Kathy]

One of the Principals at one of my schools sent this one via email:

FOCUS ON: DYSLEXIA

. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55438-2004Sep2.html

Dyslexia Not the Same in Every Culture

By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA

With 6,000 characters to memorize, Westerners shudder at the idea reading even the most basic street signs and instructions in Chinese. A new set of brain images shows why: Reading English-style alphabets and Chinese characters use very different parts of the brain.

The results also suggest that Chinese schoolchildren with reading problems misfire in a different brain region than the one used in reading alphabet-based languages like English. This demonstrates that the learning disorder dyslexia is not the same in every culture and does not have a universal biological cause, researchers said.

Neurologists described the results as "very important and innovative."

While dyslexia has certain common roots, they said they now have some proof that this kind of functional problem plays out differently according to the unique demands that Western and Eastern languages place on the brain's wiring and processing centers.

(C) 2004 The Associated Press

---

www.nature.com/news/2004/040830/full/040830-5.html

---

Chinese dyslexics have problems of their own

Helen Pilcher

There is no one cause for dyslexia: rather, the causes vary between languages. So conclude researchers who have found that Chinese children with reading difficulties have different brain anomalies to their Western counterparts¹.

The finding explains why one can be dyslexic in one language but not another. The team also hopes the work will aid the design of culturally specific strategies for learning to read and write that could benefit everyone.

People with dyslexia often find it difficult to recognize and understand words. Speakers of alphabetic languages, such as English or Russian, can have a problem converting letters into sounds. Dyslexics in these languages have reduced activity in a brain region called the left temporoparietal cortex.

But Chinese readers must learn the meanings of around 5,000 different characters, each corresponding to a word. Instead of letter-to-sound conversion problems, Chinese dyslexics have difficulties extrapolating from a symbol's shape to its sound and meaning.


(C)2004 Nature Publishing Group

[Ms. Kathy]

Sent to me in a recent email:
January 31, 2005.

Ophthalmologists Implant Five Patients with Artificial
Silicon Retina Microchip To Treat Vision Loss from Retinitis
Pigmentosa.

Solar Cell Implant May Restore Some Sight for the Blind.

CHICAGO - Ophthalmologists at Rush University Medical Center implanted Artificial Silicon Retina (ASR) microchips in the eyes of five patients to treat vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa (RP). The implant is a silicon microchip 2mm in diameter and one-thousandth of an inch thick, less than the thickness of a human hair.

Four patients had surgery Tuesday, January 25. The fifth patient is scheduled for a later date.

Rush principal investigator Dr. John Pollack performed the surgeries with Dr. Kirk Packo, Dr. Pauline Merrill, Dr.
Mathew MacCumber, and Dr. Jack Cohen. All are members of Illinois Retina Associates, S.C., a private practice group and are on the Rush faculty. Patients leave the hospital the same day and will be followed for two years as part of the study, and then indefinitely.

The patients were recruited from a pool of about 5,000
applicants.

The implants are designed for people with retinal diseases such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, which cause blindness and vision impairment in about 10 million Americans. More than one million of these people are legally blind.

"As is commonly seen in with retinitis pigmentosa, these
patients all have severe narrowing of their visual fields
down to a very small central circle, and all patients in the study are legally blind," says Pollack.

The Artificial Silicon RetinaTM (ASR) was invented by Dr.
Alan Chow, pediatric ophthalmologist and Rush faculty
member, who developed the chip and founded Optobionics,
with his brother Vincent, vice president of engineering.
Optobionics is located in Naperville, Illinois.

"This is an expansion of the study of the first 10 patients completed in 2002," says study investigator Dr. Kirk Packo, who oversees the three participating sites. The sites are Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, Emory University School of Medicine/Atlanta VA Medical Center and Rush.

Pollack says the current protocol has been modified to
reduce the likelihood of inadvertant scientific bias. "We
operated on the right eye of each of the initial 10
patients. For the next 20 patients we will randomly select which eye will receive the ASR chip. In addition, post-operative vision testers will be masked as to which eye received the ASR chip implant. The current study is being performed at these study centers in order to independently validate previous studies performed by Optobionics."

The first 10 patients all reported some degree of
improvement in visual function, says Pollack. "Improvement in visual function was variable and included the ability to read letters, improvement in color vision, and expansion of their visual field. Some patients gained new ability to recognize facial features -- something that they were unable to do before ASR chip implantation. Some patients have experienced improvement in activities of daily living such
as improved ambulation-not bumping into objects around the house, and reading the time on a clock."

Still in Phase II clinical trials, Pollack cautions it is
still too early to determine what percentage of patients
might experience improvement in vision and what resolution capability these patients might eventually have. "Although we hope that all patients receiving the chip will experience some improvement in visual function, we can't say for sure how these patients will respond to this new treatment since this is still an experimental trial. If this study and future studies show safety and efficacy of the chip and it's approved by the FDA, it could be as soon as three to five years that this technology would be available to others."

Surgical Information.

The ASR chip contains approximately 5,000 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. The
purpose of the chip is to replace damaged photoreceptors, the "light-sensing" cells of the eye, which normally convert light into electrical signals within the retina. Loss of photoreceptor cells occurs in persons with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and other retinal diseases.

The microsurgical procedure starts with three tiny incisions in the white part of the subject's eye, each incision no larger than the diameter of a needle. Through these incisions, the surgeons insert a miniature cutting and vacuuming device that removes the gel in the middle of the eye and replaces it with saline. They then make a pinpoint opening in the retina through which they inject fluid to lift up a portion of the retina from the back of the eye, creating a small pocket in the "subretinal space" just wide enough to accommodate the ASR.

The surgeons then enlarge the pocket opening and insert the implant into the subretinal space. Finally, they reseal the retina over the ASR, insert air into the middle of the eye to gently push the retina back down over the device, and close the incisions. Over a period of 1 week the air bubble is resorbed and replaced by fluids created within the eye.

According to Chow, "The use of the subretinal space to hold a device that artificially stimulates the retina seems a logical step in replacing the loss of photoreceptor cells of the retina. If the implant is tolerated well and is able to successfully stimulate the retina, it may open up new
opportunities for restoring sight in patients with the end
stages of retinitis pigmentosa."

Source URL:
www.rush.edu/webapps/MEDREL/servlet/NewsRelease?ID=608

[Ms. Kathy]

The role of blind humans' visual cortex in auditory processing.

Abstract.

Several studies using brain imaging have demonstrated occipital-cortex activation in blind individuals during tactile and auditory tasks, suggesting that the visual cortex deprived of its normal input has adopted a new role in information processing. So far, however, at what stages of information processing and to which perceptual sub-processes this applies remains unclear. We determined the auditory functions of this cortical region in early-blind humans by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found that these areas were not activated by the mere presence of sound, but were involved in the attentive processing of changes in the auditory environment, which is important in detecting potentially dangerous or other important events in the surroundings, for example.

Kujala, T., Palva, J.M., Salonen, O., Alku, p., Huotilainen,
M., Jervinen, A., & Nenen, R.

Neuroscience Letters. In press. Available online 21 January 2005.

Source URL:
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2004.12.070

[Ms. Kathy]

Also in recent email from the same source:



www.cbc.ca/quirks/media/2004-2005/mp3/qq-2005-02-05c.mp3

[Ms. Kathy]

Helping Blind to See: New Technology


New Procedure May Help Blind To See.
LOS ANGELES - A space age breakthrough in medicine may help
some blind people see.

NBC4 health reporter, Dr. Bruce Hensel, reports the procedure is being done at the University of Southern California, where the first woman to receive a retinal implant - replacing the screen at the back of her eye with photo electric cells - is seeing for the first time in decades.

When she was 28 years old, Constance Schoeman lost her sight for what she thought would be forever.

"I have retinitis pigmentosa, which is a deterioration of the retina," Schoeman said.

Schoeman tried out an artificial retina that doctors at USC are using.

"Given that there's so many patients who are blind because the light sensing cells in the retina don't work, we thought of developing a retinal prosthesis," said Dr. Mark Humayan, from USC.

The retina is the lining in the back of the eye that sends visual images to the brain. The prosthesis takes over the job.

"In essence, what this prosthesis does is take a blind person and hook them up to a camera," said Humayan.

The tiny camera, hidden in a pair of glasses, captures visual information. Then sends it through a cable to tiny electrodes implanted behind the ear.

"These electrodes then jump start electrically through tiny pulses the remaining cells in the eye and send this information to the brain," Humayan explained.

Although it's not perfect, it's the first Schoeman has been able to see in years.

"Your eye, my eye has hundreds of millions of light sensing cells and only with 16 little pixels, our patients with the model one, can differentiate between a cup, a plate and a knife," Humayan said.

"Maybe it doesn't sound like a lot to some people, but to me, it sounds like a whole lot," said Schoeman.

Hensel said doctors are currently testing the prosthesis on patients with retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration.

USC's Doheny Eye Institute can be contacted at
[phone], or by visiting their Web site at
www.usc.edu/hsc/doheny.

Other test sites include the University of California, Santa Cruz and North Carolina State University.

For information on the artificial retina project:

Department of Energy, Office of Medical Sciences Division, www.doemedicalsciences.org
Second Sight, www.2-sight.com
For information on retinal diseases:
American Academy of Ophthalmology, public website,
www.medem.com
Foundation Fighting Blindness, www.blindness.org

National Eye Institute, www.nei.nih.gov

Prevent Blindness America, www.preventblindness.org

Source URL:
www.nbc4.tv/health/4195522/detail.html

[Ms. Kathy]

[Ouite interesting. Wish I could see this in action!]




Blind student 'hears in colour'.

Geoff Adams-Spink.

BBC News website disability affairs correspondent.

A blind student has developed software that turns colours into musical notes so that he can read weather maps.

Victor Wong, a graduate student from Hong Kong studying at Cornell University in New York State, had to read coloured maps of the upper atmosphere as part of his research.

To study "space weather" Mr Wong needed to explore minute fluctuations in order to create mathematical models.

A number of solutions were tried, including having a
colleague describe the maps and attempting to print them in Braille.

Mr Wong eventually hit upon the idea of translating
individual colours into music, and enlisted the help of a
computer graphics specialist and another student to do the programming work.

'Three dimensions'.

"The images have three dimensions and I had to find a way of reading them myself," Mr Wong told the BBC News website.

"For the sake of my own study - and for the sake of blind scientists generally - I felt it would be good to develop software that could help us to read colour images."

He tried a prototype version of the software to explore a photograph of a parrot.

In order to have an exact reference to the screen, a pen and tablet device is used.

The software then assigns one of 88 piano notes to
individually coloured pixels - ranging from blue at the
lower end of this scale to red at the upper end.

Mr Wong says the application is still very much in its
infancy and is only useful for reading images that have been created digitally.

"If I took a random picture and scanned it and then used my software to recognise it, it wouldn't work that well."

'Colour memory'.

Mr Wong has been blind from the age of seven and he thinks that having a "colour memory" makes the software more useful than it would be to a scientist who had never had any vision.

"As the notes increase in pitch I know the colour's getting redder and redder, and in my mind's eye a patch of red appears."

The colour to music software has not yet been made available commercially, and Mr Wong believes that several people would have to work together to make it viable.

But he hopes that one day it can be developed to give blind people access to photographs and other images.


Source URL:
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4257961.stm

[Ms. Kathy]

Senses special: The feeling of colour.
You may think there's a picture of the world in glorious
technicolour inside your head. But it's an illusion.
New Scientist Saturday, January 29, 2005.
By Helen Phillips.

ERIK WEIHENMAYER lost his sight when he was 13. Twenty years on, in Paul Bach-y-Rita's lab at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, he caught a rolling ball, played a game of rock, paper, scissors, walked through a doorway and watched a flickering candle flame. Nothing had changed with his eyes. Instead he "saw" with his tongue.

A camera mounted on Weihenmayer's forehead fed a signal into an electronic device that turned the pattern of light and dark into electrical pulses. The pulses stimulated an array of 144 electrodes on a grid about the size of a postage stamp, which zapped the coded image onto his tongue. At first he described the sensation as being like candy pop rocks exploding, but later he experienced something more "out there" in the world - a sense of space, depth and shape.

Cheryl Schiltz danced for the first time in seven years
after just 20 minutes wearing the same device. Normally she is unable to stand upright without holding onto something and concentrating on the stable things she can see around her, because her sense of balance has been destroyed by an antibiotic. If she tilts her head, the world spins and she stumbles.

But when Bach-y-Rita's device translated signals from a sort of spirit-level-in-a-hat into patterns of pulses on her tongue, she quickly learned how to read them to substitute for her missing sense of balance. The effect persisted even when she took the device off, and lingered longer each time she tried. "I was normal," she says, still emotional when she remembered the first time. "I was completely normal, and I had forgotten what it felt like."

These "sensory substitution" devices are based on a
technology called the BrainPort, which Bach-y-Rita describes as a kind of USB connector into the brain. They are close to commercialisation, initially for "wobblers" like Schiltz, but eventually as devices for blind people too. The US military is interested in developing the system to guide pilots and divers through dark skies or murky waters, and others are looking at more frivolous uses in virtual reality and games. But in neuroscience and philosophy circles sensory substitution has attracted a great deal of interest because of what it is revealing about the brain and our senses.

The fact that Weihenmayer sensed something "out there" and forgot the tingling on his tongue, and the way Schiltz felt completely normal, even although she was working with a different sort of sensory feedback to keep her balance, suggests that the traditional separation of the senses - sight, hearing, touch and so on - has little bearing on how we experience the world. The sense organ that picks up the information, and the way it is delivered to the brain, seem less important than the nature of the information itself.

Some see this merely as a dramatic demonstration of the brain's flexibility. In other words, deprived of a primary source of information such as vision, the brain turns to a less prominent source, say touch, and extracts useful information from that sense. Others, however, have taken the findings much further, going to so far as to suggest that the traditional view of how the senses work is completely wrong.

The orthodox view of sensory perception is all about
building internal pictures of the world. Sensory systems
extract information from outside and channel it into the
brain, which builds up a representation of our environment. Sensing is therefore the passive process of picking up signals; perception is the active process of turning the signals into useful information.

This model certainly chimes with our everyday experience: we talk about our mind's eye, of mental images, and so on. And there is some scientific evidence that it is correct. Brain imaging reveals that when people see, hear, feel, smell or taste, specialised parts of their brains respond, and the timing of the response coincides with the moment of conscious perception.

Another line of evidence comes from our ability to imagine things. Even in the absence of sensory information, we can generate images and sounds in our heads, and most researchers believe that the process of imagining mimics real sensory perception. When people imagine seeing something, their visual cortex lights up. Moreover, using a technique called TMS or transcranial magnetic stimulation, which temporarily knocks out activity in the brain regions it is targeting, Harvard neuroscientists Steven Kosslyn and Alvaro Pascual-Leone have shown that people can't imagine things if their visual circuits are switched off.

That's all very well, says Kevin O'Regan, a psychologist with the CNRS, France's national research centre at Ren‚ Descartes University in Paris. But he is not convinced that this proves there is a representation of the world inside your head. In fact, he argues for a profoundly different view of sensory perception, and claims that Bach-y-Rita's sensory substitution studies support it.

O'Regan's starting point came some years back, when his interest lay mostly with eyes. He was curious as to how the world around us could feel completely stable in the face of our almost continuous eye movements, particularly large, jerky movements called saccades. O'Regan reasoned that saccades must be reported back to the brain so it could compensate for them as it built up its internal image of the world.

But he could find no evidence that this actually happens. There are neural signals associated with eye movements, but they didn't seem to be involved in building up successive visual snapshots into one big picture. Since then others have tried, and failed, to find evidence that these signals are used to compensate for eye movements in this way. But if the brain doesn't compensate for huge shifts in eye position, how can it create a stable image of the world?

Another puzzle came from a famous experiment by Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University. They asked volunteers to watch a recording of a basketball game and count the passes made by one of the teams. Early on in the game a man in a gorilla suit walked slowly across the court. Despite the fact that he was visible for about 45 seconds, around 40 per cent of the viewers failed to notice him. Yet when asked to watch the game with no task in mind, they all
saw it immediately (New Scientist, 18 November 2000, p 28). To Simons, this is strong evidence that, despite the
impression we have of seeing a complete and detailed image of the world, there's a lot missing. We rely on the brain to fill in the blanks.

O'Regan goes one step further. He suggests that the mental image is not only incomplete, it is completely absent. We don't reconstruct the world in our mind, we merely glimpse it in fleeting fragments. "There is no internal picture," he says. Where most researchers would argue that seeing is all about building up an internal image, O'Regan has us flitting from one visual element to the next, only becoming aware of things when we need information. In this, O'Regan departs radically from the traditional view of sensory perception: sensing becomes an active rather than a passive process, with potentially profound ramifications.

O'Regan had been struck by an earlier version of Bach-y-Rita's device, in which blind or blindfolded volunteers wore a larger array of electrodes taped onto the skin of their back or abdomen. One volunteer, with the array on his front, was "viewing" objects using a camera mounted on a tripod, but not getting anywhere. Out of frustration he grabbed the camera and started waving it around. When he started actively manipulating the camera in this way, something dramatic happened. He very quickly moved from merely feeling a tingling on his stomach to sensing the presence of external objects. Another volunteer, using a head-mounted camera, also suddenly felt the outside world become very real when he grabbed the zoom control - and almost fell over backwards as objects surged towards him.

(continued in next post)

[Ms. Kathy]

(Continued from last post)
What this suggests is that substituting touch informationfor visual information can produce a vision-like experience, but only when people actively control the camera in some way. Weihenmayer, for example, could almost see objects with his tongue. He didn't taste them, and after a short while he didn't feel them either. But this sensation only happened when the camera was mounted on his head, so he could move it as if he were scanning with his eyes. Similarly, blind people tapping with a cane experience open space at the end of their stick, not vibrations on their hands. They, too, are seeking information about the space around them.
Results like these have convinced O'Regan that sensory perception is not about passively collecting information but actively seeking it, and noticing how the information responds to our actions. We sense the world not by soaking up information, but by taking physical actions to
interrogate it. "If the story is right, sensations are not
generated in the brain," says O'Regan. "They are things we do." Sensory substitution works because it matters less to our brain where information comes from than the manner in which we gather it.
If it is right, O'Regan's theory doesn't just explain
sensory substitution, it has philosophical implications too. In particular it suggests a solution to one of the "hard problems" of consciousness: why does seeing something feel different from touching it? The answer certainly doesn't seem to lie in the electrical activity of the brain. Whatever sensory stimulus triggers the activity, be it touch, taste, sight or sound, the information is translated into electrical pulses. And no one has ever been able to find anything unique about these pulses, or where they are sent to in the brain, to explain why they produce different sensations.

That spongy feeling.

O'Regan believes that his "sensorimotor" theory might
provide an answer. Maybe, he says, touch, taste, sight and sound feel different because we have to perform different actions to collect the information. Take, for example, the softness of a sponge. Where does the feeling of softness come from? No one has ever found a neural mechanism or specific part of the brain that exclusively lights up when you feel something soft. That, says O'Regan, is because there isn't one. Working with philosopher Erik Myin at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, he has proposed that the feeling of softness comes from how you go about seeking information about the sponge.When you press the surface, it gives way. This is a different action from touching a sharp or hard surface, or a liquid.

While the theory seems to make sense for touch, or the difference between seeing and touching, what about the hardest "hard problem" of all, the sensation of different colours? How can we explain "redness" or "greenness" in terms of different actions? To complete his theory, O'Regan needed to find unique actions or activities that are associated with perceiving different colours.

It seemed an impossible task, but O'Regan and colleague David Philipona from the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris were in for a surprise. When they looked at the physical properties of coloured surfaces they found fundamental differences in the way the different colours interact with light. In classical models, reflections from surfaces are the sum of two sources: one that behaves like the reflection from a matt surface, and another that behaves like the reflection from a sheet of glass laid over the matt surface. As we move our eyes, both types of reflection change their spectral composition, and the relationship differs according to colour you are looking at. O'Regan suggests that as we move our eyes over a coloured surface, we detect something of this change in relationship. And by that we experience colour. The key point as far as perception goes is what happens when we probe the environment: it's not the brain activation itself that gives the colour. The researchers have found that primary colours produce particularly distinctive changes, which may explain why they are universally recognised as special.

Already, O'Regan's ideas have doubters. Bach-y-Rita thinks the explanation for sensory substitution lies with the remarkable flexibility of the brain. There are multiple pathways from all the senses to all the different sensory
areas in the brain, he says. If you lose the main input from the eyes to the visual cortex, say, weaker pathways from the skin, ears, tongue and so on take over. This is what happens in the brains of Braille readers, who recruit their visual cortex when feeling the forms of the letters.

It may not be long before we know who is right, as O'Regan and colleagues are busy thinking up testable predictions of their sensory substitution theory. One such prediction is that it should be possible to make the substitution feel more convincing by making the information-gathering action "mimic" the original as closely as possible in the new medium. To that end, O'Regan and colleague Malika Auvray have rigged up a video camera that represents the visual world in sound.

Brighter objects become louder sounds, objects high up in the visual field are represented by high pitches and object low down by low pitches, while lateral position is
represented with stereo sound. It is a little hard to imagine, but say the camera was looking at a light bulb in the centre of the field of view, you would hear powerful noise made up of a limited range of pitches centred in space. With a horizontal strip light you'd hear a smaller range of pitches over a wider space. As you move the camera, the sound changes.

In preliminary tests with a similar device designed by
engineer Peter Meijer from Eindhoven in the Netherlands, the signals took a little getting used to. But after a couple of hours of feedback either from touching or being told what they were viewing, people were able to recognise objects by their sound. They could tell plants from statues and crosses from circles. But they weren't fooled into thinking they were seeing. O'Regan's prediction is that the more they can make the sound information follow the rules of visual images, the more like seeing it will feel. For example, Meijer's system has a delay between moving the camera and hearing the sound. Another simple tweak would be to cut off the sound each time the subjects blink, which is exactly what happens to our visual world, though we scarcely notice it.

Perhaps one day blind people will play rock, paper, scissors in stereo surround sound. And if O'Regan is right, they could feel almost as if they are seeing. Now that really would be a sensation.

Source URL:
www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18524841.800

[Ms. Kathy]

Camera-Mounted Spectacles May Restore Sight.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A small camera mounted on spectacles and connected to the optical nerve could restore the sight of thousands of people suffering from deterioration of the retina, European scientists said on Monday.

The medical advance has the potential to help over 300,000 Europeans whose sight is impaired as the thin layer of tissue which lines the eye and processes images
deteriorates, Belgian Professor Claude Veraart told a news conference.

"We have implanted (the device) in two patients so far,"
Veraart from the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve
near Brussels said.

A camera mounted on glasses sends images to an electronic device implanted behind the eye and stimulates the optic nerve which passes the information to the brain.

The technology could also help people with the retinal
disease, macular degeneration, which can lead to loss of
fine detail sight and which is one of the leading causes of visual impairment in the United States.

Based on the price of hearing devices known as Cochlear implants, which also involve inserting components in the head, the new technology will cost about 20,000 euros ($26,120), Veraart said.

Fifteen independent teams around the world are working on similar technology but the Belgian project, which coordinates the pan-European effort involving researchers in France and Germany, has the best results, he added.

EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding said the device would be sold on the market from 2008-10.

"This is a very good example where European technology can lead worldwide," she said, adding that the cost of the equipment would fall over time.

The EU executive Commission, which is spending 3.6 billion euros on information and communication technology projects between 2002 and 2006, has granted 2.79 million euros toward research into treating visual impairment.

It wants to increase research spending across the 25-nation bloc to revive stagnant economic growth and stop the brain drain of top scientists to the United States.

Source URL:
olympics.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=7690717

[Ms. Kathy]

Definition of "Sight" site
www.selfknowledge.com/88281.htm

[Ms. Kathy]

Wal-Mart Tests Robots for Blind Shoppers.

May 6, 2005. By Evan Schuman, eWEEK.

Wal-Mart on Thursday started quietly testing a
university-created robot designed to help visually
impaired consumers navigate store aisles and find their
desired products.

The robot - named RG, for Robotic Guide - is the creation
of Vladimir Kulyukin, an assistant professor of computer
science at Utah State University and the director of the
university's Computer Science Assistive Technology
Laboratory.

The initial version of RG - which weighs about 22 pounds
and is roughly the height of an upright vacuum cleaner -
is limited to three basic functions.

First, it guides the consumer through the aisles and
around people, displays and merchandise using RFID
readers and 16 ultrasonic sonars. The navigation system
is sophisticated enough to handle environments - including
elevators and limited open spaces - that usually literally
trip up robots, Kulyukin said.

The university has posted quite a few videos of RG in
various stages of testing.

Its second function is to communicate with the consumer.
It takes instructions via a small Braille directory of
products that is attached to the robot's handle, and it
replies to the shopper's questions with spoken answers.

The third function is to use its RFID reader to locate
the desired products. The store's RFID tags help the
robot navigate the lanes as well as locate products.

"There are RFID sensors placed on the shelves in the
store. The robot has the RFID antennae and detects the
presence of those tags," Kulyukin said. "That's how it
knows it's reached the Colgate section of the toothpaste
shelf and it then announces, "You have reached the
Colgate toothpaste section, on your right.'"

The robot has its limitations, though. Until item-level
tagging becomes the norm, the system can indicate only
the part of the shelf where the product is supposed to
be. If it's been moved - either by an employee moving stock
who forgot to move the update the RFID tag or by another
consumer who put a tube of Aim toothpaste amidst the
Colgate - the visually impaired consumer might grab the
wrong product.

"It certainly can be jumbled, and there is the potential
to pick up the wrong product," Kulyukin said, adding that
his team is trying to add a robotic bar code into the
system so that the robot would announce the product being
placed in the cart. That functionality would likely
address most of the mistaken product purchases, he said.

The robot's development is still at a very early stage
and has thus far mostly been paid for with a $500,000
grant from the National Science Foundation, Kulyukin
said. He is negotiating with a large national retail
chain to buy the units and invest in its further
development.

Kulyukin refused to identify the chain, but an employee
in the university's public relations department, Whitney
Wilkinson, said the chain was indeed Wal-Mart. Kulyukin
also said Wal-Mart was testing it locally.

The store manager of the Wal-Mart store in North Logan,
Utah, right near the university's labs, confirmed that RG
had arrived on Thursday.

"It's a great thing for the customers who don't have
their eyesight," said Wal-Mart store manager Ron Tuttle.
"We have a lot of customers who come in and ask for
someone to help them. I talked with one lady and she was
very excited about it because it makes her feel more
independent."

The cost of the robots will vary depending on how many of
them Kulyukin's team is asked to create, but he purposely
kept the cost low. To create a second robot would cost
him about $10,000, he said, adding that the per-unit cost
would drop to about $4,000 to $5,000 if thousands were
ordered and to about $1,500 if millions were ordered. He
said he will need about $3 million to $5 million in seed
money to move to the next stage of development and
production.

The technical hardware of the system is simple: Most of
the components sit in a PVC pipe structure. The robot's
microcontroller is attached to a laptop, with which it
communicates via serial cable. The laptop also can
communicate using an 802.11b wireless card.

Kulyukin said he has spent much of his life focused on
using technology to help those with physical challenges,
partly to help his brother, who has always had severe
hearing disabilities. "Growing up as the brother of a
disabled child, I know firsthand how harsh the
environment can be on you," he said.

The problem of blind shoppers is fairly widespread. The
National Institutes of Health's National Eye Institute
estimates that 80 million Americans today have
potentially blinding eye diseases and 1.1 million people
are legally blind.

"Approximately 12 million people have some degree of
visual impairment that cannot be corrected by glasses,
and more than 100 million people need corrective lenses
to see properly," the institute's Web site says.

Given that RG is only in very limited experimentation
today, how do most blind consumers shop? "They simply
don't go grocery shopping," Kulyukin said. "If you happen
to have a sighted spouse or a friend, that's what you do.
[RG] is an independence device."

The business side of the retail argument for these robots
is twofold. First, the people who shop for those blind
consumers might not shop at the places those consumers
would want. These kinds of robots would return the store-
selection power back to those consumers.

Secondly, not many grocery stores have the financial
resources of a Wal-Mart to invest in this level of
robotic technology. Arguably, this could be a major
differentiating factor in bringing visually impaired
customers - and their friends and families - to Wal-Mart who
might otherwise have shopped at the competition.

Kulyukin also said that having a small squadron of robots
around a retail shop could be valuable in other ways.
When there are no customers using the robots, they can
assist in moving merchandise, carrying extremely heavy
boxes and unloading trucks. After all, what good is
having a bionic robotic arm if it's not flexed once in a
while?

The robot "doesn't have to sit idly in the store. It can
optimize the store's supply operations," Kulyukin said.
"Instead of letting a truck come to the store and having
it unloaded manually, load it onto the robot and then let
the robot deliver it."

Evan Schuman can be reached at
[e-mail].

Source URL:
www.cioinsight.com/print_article2/0,2533,a=151386,00.asp

[Ms. Kathy]

[ Former student Otis W. sent this. Otis now works for Freedom Scientific.]
Subject: Stevie Wonder Makes Historic Breakthrough For Blind and Low Vision Music Fans

PR Newswire
Thursday, May 05, 2005

Stevie Wonder Makes Historic Breakthrough For Blind and Low Vision Music
Fans

CAPTION: Music icon Stevie Wonder, with a career spanning more than 4 decades on Motown Records prepares to release his much anticipated album
"A Time To Love". (PRNewsFoto)

'So What The Fuss' First Descriptive Music Video

LOS ANGELES, May 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Stevie Wonder once again is making music history by implementing a landmark music video innovation for his new song "So What The Fuss." For the first time in music history, the
new clip will contain a second, descriptive audio track, recorded by hip hop star Busta Rhymes, to be made accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. Two versions of the video will be released; The first
will be a traditional music video, serviced to music channels; and the second version will be accompanied with the ground breaking video description technique, which airs on all SAP- accessible Television channels.

(Photo: www.newscom.com/cgi.bin/prnh/20050505/NYTH167 )

On Monday, May 9 in Los Angeles, Stevie Wonder will present both versions of the video, directed by Paul Hunter (Snoop Dogg, Will Smith) and allow his fans to experience the first music video description process for themselves.

"Until now music videos have been very one dimensional for those who are blind or with low vision," says Wonder. "Now all music video fans will be able to apply their vision to my video thanks to the descriptive
technique and of course, a great narration by Busta Rhymes. For me, the entire concept is indicative of what happens when you go beyond the status quo and open yourself up to what's possible."

On Wednesday, May 11, Yahoo! Music will have the on-line premiere of both versions of the video, bringing this new description technique to the music community on the web.

Linda Idoni, West Coast Director of Operations for the Media Access Group of WGBH, the Boston Public Television Station that pioneered the video description technology and wrote the narration for the video, says
that Wonder's interest in video description enhances awareness about the technical capabilities now available to the visually impaired. "Until now, a visually impaired music fan would be missing out on key elements of music videos. For Stevie Wonder to embrace the description process enables a lot of passionate music fans to enjoy the song in a whole
other medium."

Wonder, a longtime fan of the charismatic Busta Rhymes, enlisted the effusive hip hop star to perform the video narration in Wonder's L.A. recording studio. According to sources who attended the historic session, Rhymes infused the audio description of the music clip with characteristic flair, more than adequately describing the raucous scenario that erupts in the clip for "So What The Fuss," set in an apartment and surrounding neighborhood where Wonder and company's infectious performance of the song takes place.

"Stevie Wonder is an American icon," says Rhymes. "Without him, most of us never would have picked up a microphone. Only Stevie could come up
with a way to let fans that have never seen a video take part in the whole vibe. It was a great project to work on from start to finish."

Stevie is currently working on cutting-edge technology that will make music descriptive videos more accessible throughout the country, and alternately, throughout the world.

"So What The Fuss" is the first single from Stevie Wonder's soon to be released album, A Time To Love.

SOURCE Universal Motown Web Site: www.universalrecords.com

Photo Notes: NewsCom:

www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050505/NYTH167

AP Archive:
photoarchive.ap.org

PRN Photo Desk,
[e-mail]
www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/0
5-05
-2005/0003545341&EDATE

[Ms. Kathy]

Article: Brain: Brain May Be Less Plastic Than Hoped
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
www.hhmi.org/news/smirnakis.html

Article: Bionic Vision: Cheri's Story

KSDK Channel 5, St. Louis, Missouri (vidieo may still be available at site) www.ksdk.com/news/cover_article.aspx?storyid=79475


Talkng Gizmos talkinggizmos.com/index.cfm/Beyond_Talking_Products/

[Ms. Kathy]

Viagra reported to cause blindness

www.chinaview.cn 2005-05-30 14:52:24


BEIJING, May 30 -- US regulators have received more than 40 reports of a type of blindness in men who use Viagra and other impotence drugs, but have not determined if the medicines were responsible.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it has about 38 reports of the rare condition among Viagra users, four reports among users of Eli Lilly and Co.'s Cialis and one report in a man who took GlaxoSmithKline Plc's Levitra.

In some cases users are getting visual problems within a short time.

While it has been known for years that users of impotence drugs could experience short-term vision changes, seeing green or blueish hues, what has raised the red flags is the immediacy of the drug's impact and its lasting effect.

They say the vision loss -- known as non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) -- is caused by a sort of stroke affecting the blood vessels of the eye when they become choked off, eventually causing some of the cells in the eye to die.

Interestingly, the number of people who get this same type of stroke is actually about four times higher for people who don't take Viagra, the study's researchers say.

New York-based Pfizer, Viagra's manufacturer, said it is weighing a change to the Viagra label. But it emphasized no proof exists that links the blindness to the drug, which was introduced in 1998 and had $1.68 billion in sales in 2004.

More than 23 million men worldwide have taken Viagra over the past seven years, Pfizer said. Reports are extremely rare of the condition of NAION, the company said. NAION can cause permanent vision loss in one or both eyes.

Pfizer already warns the drug should not be used by men with heart conditions whose doctors have warned them not to have sex.

Also, patients taking drugs that contain nitrates have been warned not to take Viagra because of sudden, unsafe drops in blood pressure.

Source: news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-05/30/content_3020770.htm

Blindness scare spooks impotence drug firms
Source:http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage.php?
C H Unnikrishan / Mumbai July 12, 2005



USFDA to alert drug controllers & to restrict their use by issuing warnings.

The Rs 480-crore anti-erectile dysfunction drug market may lose its vigour with the Drug Controller-General of India planning to put these drugs under a safety watch.

The move comes two days after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an alert saying that the use of popular impotency drugs like Viagra (sildenafil citrate) and Cialis (tadalafil) may cause sudden blindness due to blockage of blood to optic nerves.

Anti-impotency drugs are made in India by Ranbaxy, Cipla, Zydus Cadila, Sun Pharma, Torrent, Cadila Pharma, Unichem and a few others. An official in the Central Drugs Standards Control Organisation told Business Standard that since the drug alert had been notified by the regulator at the location of invention (US FDA), immediate action would be taken to alert all state drug controllers to caution patients across the country and also to restrict their use by issuing safety warnings.

PR Joshi, president (corporate affairs), Zydus Cadila, the largest player in the segment, said the company was yet to hear from the regulator about the alert. “We will follow the regulator’s directive once it reaches the company,” he said.

The US agency said men over 50 and those who smoke were in the high-risk categories and it had received 46 ADR (adverse drug reaction reports) in such cases.

Indian authorities, however, said they were in no position to immediately pinpoint the side effects caused by such drugs as the Central Drugs Standards Control Organisation did not have an effective adverse drug-reaction monitoring systems.

In India, the generic versions of sildenafil citrate (Viagra of Pfizer) were launched in 2001. Initially, the market for the impotence-management drug was pegged at Rs 70 crore with an estimated annual growth of more than 20 per cent.

Though the drug was approved by DCGI as a restricted prescription category, it is a known fact that product is available without prescription in all medical stores.

The major brands of sildenafil citrate in India are Penegra (Zydus), Caverta ( Ranbaxy), Silegra (Cipla), Androz (Torrent), Edigra (Sun Pharma), and Juan (Cadila Pharma), Erix (Unichem). The other drug -- tadalafil -- was launched last year by Ranbaxy.

It is estimated that about 50 million Indians suffer from impotency and about 9 out of every 10 men do not seek treatment. Studies indicate that men with diabetes have three-fold higher incidence of erectile dysfunction and 50 per cent of them develop the condition within 10 years of being diagnosed with diabetes.