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Sensory
Substitution |
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| The person who can be seen
as the father of sensory substitution is the physician Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita.
In the late sixties, he built the empirical foundation of the “substitution
of the senses”. Currently he is continuing his research in the
‘Department of Orthopedics
& Rehabilitation, University of Wisconsin-Madison’. Bach-y-Rita was looking for a possibility to use machines for the compensation of sensory deficits. So, for instance, the use of a camera and transduction of the picture into systematical tactile stimulation can compensate a deficit in visual perception. This idea was first realized in the year 1963 in a ‘Tactile to Visual Sensory Substitution’ device (TVSS). The pictures taken by the camera are transduced into tactile stimulation at the back of blind persons. The use of the tactile sense for the human-machine interface was made possible through the enormous adaptability (plasticity) of the brain. |
 The TVSS device |
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| A
sensorimotor account
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| A theoretical basis of our
work and an explanation why the sensory substitution works, is provided
by the perception theory of Alva Noe and Kevin O’Regan. According
to their approach, the special experience, which we associate with
a certain sensory modality, is not established by the activation of
certain brain areas. It will, however, be defined through the systematical
change in the sensation as a result of an action. In this context,
a modality becomes a certain way of actively exploring the environment
and it is not bound to a certain sensory apparatus. A comprehensive presentation of the theory can be found in the article published in 2001: "A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness". |
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| Related
Links Sensory Substitution: The Bach-y-Rita Chronicles Spatial Navigation: Hexatown Wearable Computing: wearIT@work |
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