A young British soldier who was blinded by a grenade whilst serving in Iraq has had his life transformed by a new technology that allows him to “see” with his tongue.
24 year old Lance Corporal Lundberg was with the 2nd Battalion, The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment in Basra back in 2007, when a rocket-propelled grenade struck.
Lundberg subsequently had to have one eye removed and the other was so severely damaged he is classed as profoundly blind.
Now, thanks to a gadget called “BrainPort”, he can do things he has not been able to do for the past three years by using sensors on his tongue to create mental images which help him cope with his lack of vision.
BrainPort works via a tiny video camera attached to a pair of sunglasses which convert images into electrical impulses.
These pulses are then transmitted to the tongue via a plastic “lollipop” held in the mouth. The impulses are felt on the tongue as a kind of tingling sensation but by learning to interpret the different signals, the user is able to visualise images and move around objects, even pick them up.
Basically light pixels are transmitted as strong signals and dark pixels as weak signals with varying amounts of contrast in between.
“BrainPort” was actually developed in the United States and Lundberg will be the first person in Britain to try it out after he was chosen to do so by the Ministry of Defence.
The user obviously needs quite a bit of training to be able to discern the signals and Lundberg travelled to the US along with his military eye doctor Wing Commander Rob Scott to get it.
The device which was developed by the Centre for Vision Restoration for the US Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM), is still at the prototype stage and at the moment sends electrical pulses to only a few hundred sensors on the tongue but in future this figure will be upped to a few thousand sensor points allowing for clearer “images”.
On describing what it feels like to use BrainPort, Lundberg said “it feels like licking a nine volt battery or like popping candy”.
The new technology has given Lundberg greater freedom than he had before and although he says the equipment still needs some work he also says it has “huge potential”.
Amazing!
