device from MIT converts text to audio for visually impaired

New finger-mounted device from MIT converts text to audio for visually impaired

by Shruti Dhapola Mar 11, 2015 14:55 IST

#finger #Finger-mounted device #Finger-reader #science #ScienceBuzz #Visually Impaired

Print this Article

Washington: MIT researchers have developed a finger-worn device with a built-in camera that converts written text into audio for the visually impaired. The device provides feedback - either tactile or audible - that guides the user's finger along a line of text, and the system generates the corresponding audio in real time.
Roy Shilkrot, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student in media arts and sciences and colleagues tested several variations of their device in a study with vision-impaired volunteers.
One included two haptic motors, one on top of the finger and the other beneath it. The vibration of the motors indicated whether the subject should raise or lower the tracking finger.
Another version, without the motors, instead used audio feedback: a musical tone that increased in volume if the user's finger began to drift away from the line of text. The researchers also tested the motors and musical tone in conjunction.

There was no consensus among the subjects, however, on which types of feedback were most useful. Researchers are now concentrating on audio feedback, since it allows for a smaller, lighter-weight sensor. The key to the system's performance is an algorithm for processing the camera's video feed, which Shilkrot and his colleagues developed.
Each time the user positions his or her finger at the start of a new line, the algorithm makes a host of guesses about the baseline of the letters. Since most lines of text include letters whose bottoms descend below the baseline, and because skewed orientations of the finger can cause the system to confuse nearby lines, those guesses will differ.
But most of them tend to cluster together, and the algorithm selects the median value of the densest cluster. That value, in turn, constrains the guesses that the system makes with each new frame of video, as the user's finger moves to the right, which reduces the algorithm's computational burden.
In the study, the algorithms were executed on a laptop connected to the finger-mounted devices.
In ongoing work, Marcel Polanco, a master's student in computer science and engineering, and Michael Chang, an undergraduate computer science major participating in the project through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme, are developing a version of the software that runs on an Android phone, to make the system more portable.

"There is now convincing evidence to challenge the current theory that consciousness can only exist inside the brain - and if you can have consciousness without associated brain function, that is enormously important for our understanding of the mind," he said.

For his latest research, 60 patients at Southampton General Hospital’s coronary care unit were interviewed after heart attacks had left them temporarily brain-dead. Seven reported near-death experiences - defined by characteristic features such as a feeling of leaving your body, going through a tunnel and entering an area of "love, bliss and consciousness".

Dr Peter Fenwick on Near Death Experience (NDE) - YouTube

▶ 17:28

www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PmjKn1zPE

Feb 11, 2012 - Uploaded by More Talk

Dr Peter Fenwick, renowned neuro-psychiatrist, will discuss his research on the near-death experience.D

Dr Fenwick said: "If the mind and brain can be independent, then that raises questions about the continuation of consciousness after death. It also raises the question about a spiritual component to humans and about a meaningful universe with a purpose rather than a random universe

."We cannot keep the life we have on the Earth realm, not our possessions or attachments or relationships. What we can keep is our memories and our feelings of what we have integrated into our heart of hearts from the experience of being here, plus the love we have shared with others." - P.M.H. Atwater

The expansion of mind in NDEs have happened to many people

The following NDE descriptions of consciousness expansion supports the theory of consciousness described above by Stanislav Grof. It theorizes that the brain acts as a reducing valve of cosmic input to produce consciousness. At death, this reducing-valve function ceases and consciousness is then free to expand. The following NDEs support this:

a.	"I realized that, as the stream was expanding, my own consciousness was also expanding to take in everything in the Universe!" (Mellen-Thomas Benedict)
b.	"My mind felt like a sponge, growing and expanding in size with each addition ... I could feel my mind expanding and absorbing and each new piece of information somehow seemed to belong." (Virginia Rivers)
c.	"In your life review you'll be the universe." (Thomas Sawyer)
d.	"This white light began to infiltrate my consciousness. It came into me..It seemed I went out into it. I expanded into it as it came into my field off consciousness." (Jayne Smith)
e.	"My presence fills the room. And now I feel my presence in every room in the hospital. Even the tiniest space in the hospital is filled with this presence that is me. I sense myself beyond the hospital, above the city, even encompassing Earth. I am melting into the universe. I am everywhere at once." (Josiane Antonette)
f.	"I felt myself expanding and expanding until I thought, "I'm going to burst!" The moment I thought, "I'm going to burst!", I suddenly found myself alone, back where this being had met me, and he had gone." (Margaret Tweddelll)
g.	Susan had an out-of-body experience where she left her body and grew very big, as big as a planet at first, and then she filled the solar system and finally she became as large as the universe. (Susan Blackmore)

Scientists create 'genetic firewall' for new forms of life

Reuters | Jan 23, 2015, 04.42 AM IST

Comments

READ MORE scientists|New forms|major obstacle|Genetically Modified Organisms|genetic firewall

Scientists create 'genetic firewall' for new forms of life

If the technique succeeds, it could be used in microbes engineered for uses from the mundane to the exotic, such as producing yogurt and cheese, synthesizing industrial chemicals and biofuels, cleaning up toxic waste, and manufacturing drugs. (Getty Images)

NEW YORK: A year after creating organisms that use a genetic code different from every other living thing, two teams of scientists have achieved another "synthetic biology" milestone — they created bacteria that cannot survive without a specific manmade chemical, potentially overcoming a major obstacle to wider use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The advance, reported on Wednesday in Nature, offers what one scientist calls a "genetic firewall" to achieve biocontainment, a means of insuring that GMOs cannot live outside a lab or other confined environment.

Although the two labs accomplished this in bacteria, "there is no fundamental barrier" to applying the technique to plants and animals, Harvard Medical School biologist George Church, who led one of the studies, told reporters. "I think we are moving in (that) direction."

If the technique succeeds, it could be used in microbes engineered for uses from the mundane to the exotic, such as producing yogurt and cheese, synthesizing industrial chemicals and biofuels, cleaning up toxic waste, and manufacturing drugs.

Microbes are already used for those applications. In some cases they contain genes from an unrelated organism, making them "genetically engineered" or "genetically modified" to, say, gobble up oil spills or produce insulin. But widespread use of such GMOs has been constrained by concerns they could escape into the wild and do damage.

In 2013, Church's team announced they had leaped beyond genetic engineering to create "genomically recoded" organisms. Recoding means that one bit of their DNA codes for an amino acid (a building-block of proteins) different from what the identical DNA codes for in every other living thing. The biologists had rewritten the genetic spelling book.

In the new studies, teams led by Church and a former colleague, Farren Isaacs, created strains of E. coli bacteria that both contain DNA for a manmade amino acid and require synthetic amino acids to survive.

Because the amino acids do not exist in nature, said Isaacs, now at Yale University, the resulting "firewall" means any GMOs that escaped a lab, manufacturing facility, or agricultural field would die.

Church's team made 49 genetic changes to E. coli to make them dependent on the synthetic amino acid. The odds of a microbe undoing all the changes are astronomically high, he calculated.

By pairing genomic recoding with this firewall, biologists could create escape-proof microbes which, by incorporating novel amino acids, could produce entirely new types of drugs and polymers, Church said.