Smart Clothes Vest: Let Hearing Impaired People Perceive The Sound Through Skin.

At present, many hearing impaired assistive devices or cochlear implants in the market are either too expensive or require surgery.

However, neuroscientists David Igor Mann (David Eagleman) and his postgraduate students have developed a new sensory substation clothing called Vibrotactile Extra-Sensory Transducer. Vest Hearing impaired people can wear a vest similar to their vest. Smart clothes Wear on the body, perceive the external voice.

Vest can transform voice into haptic feedback. Igor man said that after training, the brain can know how to transform the vibration of Vest into useful information, which means that the Vest wearer may hear the external voice through the skin.

This sounds crazy, but Igor Mann says this is similar to the working principle of human hearing system. He explained that the human brain can not actually hear any sound, but it can "translate" electronic signals and present them in your consciousness, which is the principle used in cochlear implantation. However, Igor did not need surgery to achieve the same result. If your body can "translate" the electronic signals from the ears, why can't the brain "translate" the electronic signals from the skin?

At present, Vest focuses mainly on helping to restore hearing, but Igor finally hopes to use the same system to enhance people's cognition. Can we understand the weather and stock data through skin? Igor thinks this possibility exists. The human brain can transform Vest data into human perception, just like perceiving the weather as an inborn behavior.

At present, the Vest project has appeared on the Kickstarter crowd raising website. Igor man plans to raise $40 thousand (about 245 thousand yuan) to start the fund to create a better prototype product.