Vibrotactile Devices for the Deaf

[para. 1]: “Vibrotactile devices are technologies that convert sound into perceptible vibrations on the skin. One early example was the adaptation of a speaking tube commonly used for intraship communication. The adaptation replaced the cone on the receiver’s side with a rubber tube that was held in the palm of the hand. In the early 1920’s, Robert Harvey Gault used this system to train an artificially deafened subject to identify 200 words. In the 1950’s, Frank A. Geldard was able to advance the use of the system into a full-scale tactile language that he called vibratese. Vibrotactile technology progressed through the latter half of the 20th century as researchers began to explore how vocoders could be used to increase the fidelity of vibratory patterns. The advent of cochlear implants in the 1980s attenuated the enthusiasm for vibrotactile devices; however, there has been a resurgence of interest in vibrotactile devices directed toward music applications. Notably, pitch and rapid amplitude fluctuations are not well transmitted by a cochlear implant.”