Daily Archives: November 23, 2009

A Horror Movie Plot

…only real:

‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear’: Man trapped in 23-year ‘coma’ reveals horror of being unable to tell doctors he was conscious

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.

Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.

Kudos to the conscientious doctor who ran the tests that determined this man’s actual mental state. I hope that others follow suit in similar cases. It is hard to imagine the plight of those who might be trapped in similar circumstances.

Houben says frustration is “too small a word” to describe what he experienced over those 23 years, and that he coped with this nightmare by willing his mind to imagine a better life.

If there is any good news to be found here, it must be the extraordinary resiliency of spirit that Houben displayed. If you gave me this story as a hypothetical, I would guess that the victim would go insane within a matter of months, certainly within a few years. But even in these extreme circumstances, the human mind surprises us with its ability to survive.

Feeling Their Way

















Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world









Special Dispatch
November 23, 2009





We’ll be running daily BATT’s all Thanksgiving week.



An excellent development from MIT:



 For many people, it has become routine to go online to check out a map before traveling to a new place. But for blind people, Google maps and other visual mapping applications are of little use. Now, a unique device developed at MIT could give the visually impaired the same kind of benefit that sighted people get from online maps.



The BlindAid system, developed in MIT’s Touch Lab, allows blind people to “feel” their way around a virtual model of a room or building, familiarizing themselves with it before going there.

 

Once [Touch Lab director Mandayam] Srinivasan obtains additional funding, he…believes BlindAid could be used to help blind people not only preview public spaces such as train stations, but also plan and travel by public transportation using virtual route maps that they can download and interact with through touch.


Empowering the visually impaired by enabling them to “preview” an unfamiliar place by sense of touch is just the beginning. The integration of GPS technology with the ubiquitous (and increasingly detailed) mapping of the world available online opens up huge possibilities for the blind, requiring only that the data be made available through a non-visual interface. As attention begins to turn to the mapping of interior spaces, the utility of such information grows exponentially.

 

One day soon, blindness will be a thing of the past. In the mean time, it is encouraging to see how emerging technologies (and the resulting emerging possibilities) continue to chip away at the barriers the visually impaired have always encountered when trying to interact with a world that assumes vision.



handmap.JPG



Live to see it!