Day 1
My plan is to hook up a microphone to a motor on somebody’s wrist, so that when the microphone hears a loud noise, it powers the motor to spin quickly, thus vibrating the hand. This can be used for deaf people, or people with cochlear implants, who have trouble determining the direction of sound. They can compare the vibration of both wrists, and determine which direction sound comes from. If you've read a book called Vehicles by Valentino Braitenburg, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. If you have a vehicle with two sensors on either side of it, which detect, say, light, and power its corresponding motor, it will turn towards or away from light, depending on which motor the sensors are connected to.
The idea is that this will replace, or help, the human hearing sense. Over a course of a few weeks, the implementation will be natural, so that they don’t have to even think about these new ‘inputs’. A man wore a belt that was covered in compasses that were wired to motors in such a way that the part of the belt he was wearing that faced north would buzz, making him feel a buzzing sensation on whichever side of him faced north, giving him an intuitive sense of direction, and after a couple of weeks this became natural to him, so he didn’t have to stop and think about which part of him was buzzing.
Today I just did the basics, so that I had a ‘fake’ microphone and motor. I displayed how the motor would spin on screen with a program, according to how well a circuit conducted electricity. I used an Analogue to Digital converter to convert the amount of electricity received at one end of a circuit into information that my VB6 program could use. I found the RMS (the square root of (the average of the (values squared))) of the values, and then put it through a Pulse-Width Modulation for the output (PWMing converts a decimal, say, .25, into a series of 0s and 1s that average out to the decimal. (0001000100010001000100010001)). This was then graphed.
