Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Translating Speech Into Vibrations

Scientists at Baylor have built a device that takes spoken words and turn them into vibrations which they say could help deaf people perceive speech in a completely new way. The VEST (versatile extra-sensory transducer) uses a mic to take sound and feed them into a phone or tablet where the audio is converted into vibrations. Baylor neuroscientists Scott Novich and David Eagleman presented their work at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience this past weekend in Washington. Their Kickstarter campaign for the VEST has surpassed its goal and raised $47,000. You can read more here. Below is a video about the effort.