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Global Challenges

Technology and People That Can Change Lives

Aired October 28, 2006 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, CNN INTERNATIONAL HOST: On this GLOBAL CHALLENGES. Eye of the beholder.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's amazing to be able to see a face.

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MANN: One small step for man.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It actually can be emotional as we're beginning to wire my body up to prosthesis.

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MANN: And child's play.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is lots of things that these kids can do. We need to be a little bit creative.

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MANN: On GLOBAL CHALLENGES, technology and people that can change lives.

Hello and welcome to GLOBAL CHALLENGES, coming to you today from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as MIT.

Now technically speaking and that is what people here do, this is a place of learning, but the students, the faculty, the researchers are all trying to take things a step further. They not only want to understand how every molecule, machine and man work, they tend to want to make them better, improve it, especially when they see a real need.

Today we're going to focus on a few technologies that took an enormous amount of brainpower to develop and that actually fool the brain into thinking that it's feeling or seeing things that aren't actually there.

The benefits, though, are clear to see.

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ELIZABETH GOLDRING, MIT ADVANCED VISUAL STUDIES CENTER: Disappearance. Things are disappearing. Branches from trees, pieces of words, lines, in places.

MANN: The poem "Disappearance" was written by Elizabeth Goldring, a woman whose site disappeared because of illness. A poet transformed into an artist and innovator.

GOLDRING: OK. I see it.

I see it enough to invent with my left eye. And that's very important. It's part of what I consider to be the beauty of the seeing machine is that it lets me see enough to expand your visual imagination. Even if you're blind.

MANN (voice-over): The seeing machine is Goldring's passion. Every since doctors used a high tech device to examine her eyes, then enabled her to see images, Goldring has worked with students at MIT and experts to develop a more affordable personal version.

Her machine beams intense light through a tiny computer screen, projecting images through a lens directly onto the retina like a slide or movie screen so that even people with only a fraction of their vision left can see.

GOLDRING: When I look in this machine I need to move my head around a bit to find the part of my retina that still works and the image is bright enough that it goes right to that part.

MANN (on camera): So what you're looking at now is both a word and a representation of the word, I take it.

GOLDRING: Yes.

MANN (voice-over): It still isn't easy to read so Goldring invented a new kind of script, too.

GOLDRING: With my visual language, tried to augment the word graphically or through pictures so that the word book becomes B, an image of a book, a very simple image of a book, and a K.

MANN: From the world fold that's literally folded, to look looking out, Goldring has lost count of all the words she's respelled in her new script.

She can also play animation or video through the machine, showing a patient how to navigate through an unfamiliar setting.

GOLDRING: My idea is that one could sit in the privacy one's home and look at the place that one is going to travel to and go there and with much more self confidence.

MANN: The world, of course, is made up of people as well as places. The seeing eye machine helps there, too, enabling the user to see family or friends, possibly for the first time.

GOLDRING: It's amazing to be able to see a face. To have the experience, the visual experience of seeing a face.

MANN: So after we talked, we gave Elizabeth Goldring a chance to see me more clearly on the seeing machine.

GOLDRING: I see your eyes very clearly. I didn't see your eyes at all during the interview, really. They're so bright.

MANN: Goldring is still a poet but ironically enough, after she lost her vision she turned to visual art. These are reproductions of her own work hanging in a virtual museum.

She calls her works retinaprints because that quite literally is what they are, images of her own damaged retina superimposed on pictures of what she sees through it.

GOLDRING: My retinaprints are my image of what I'm seeing as I look through the seeing machine with my blind eyes. They're a kind of a blind sight.

MANN: The seeing machine hasn't yet been manufactured for wider use. When that happens, Goldring says, the visually impaired will not only get a chance to see, they will get a chance to create.

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MANN (on camera): It's just a short walk across campus to another researcher who is working full time on the science of walking, developing new feet, ankles and legs for amputees. Hugh Herr knows just what they're going through.

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MANN (voice-over): Hugh Herr is his own guinea pig. He designs state of the art computerized prosthetics and that's him trying one out, walking in way that's been impossible for years.

HUGH HERR, MIT BIOMECHATRONICS GROUP: I lost my legs in 1982. I was stranded on a mountain in January in the east coast of the United States and suffered very severe frostbite. The surgeons ended up having to amputate both of my limbs and I haven't had direct control over my ankle since 1982. It actually can be emotional as we're beginning to wire my body up to the prosthesis and it's interesting emotionally.

MANN: Herr is the head of the Biomechatronics Lab at MIT, mixing biology, mechanics and electronics to construct limbs that learn to work like the ones we're born with. It's nut just making the limb, it's programming it to move with the rest of the body. Sensing motion and momentum and joining right in. Look at the difference as this woman navigates stairs with a prosthetic leg that doesn't know what her real leg is doing.

Watch her now with a leg that learns and relearns every moment how it has to move. Electronic sensors measure how far she has bent her knee and how much pressure she is putting on it. A computer chip tells the knee how stiffly or loosely to swing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You guys have no idea. You have no idea, man.

HERR: So this is the rioknee (ph).

MANN: Herr's computerized knee is now being used around the world. He's working on an ankle and he has bigger plans.

HERR: I believe and many people in my field believe that if this is an artificial hand, that one day, if I were to touch that artificial hand, that I would actually be able to feel it. One day leg amputees will not only be able to walk across a sandy beach but actually be able to feel the sand against their prosthesis.

MANN: Amazing strides that Hugh Herr is taking one step at a time.

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MANN (on camera): We're going to take a break now and then move from research to results. GLOBAL CHALLENGES returns right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: This is the Status Center, one of the best known buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was designed by architect Frank Gehry and it's fun to see what a little imagination and engineering can accomplish.

They can, of course, accomplish a whole lot more. Keith Oppenheim has the story now of two people whose lives have been transformed by medical engineering.

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KEITH OPPENHEIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The cutting edge of science has made it possible for this man to trim the hedges.

JESSE SULLIVAN, BIONIC ARM PATIENT: I might not do everything that I once did but I can do some of the things I once did.

OPPENHEIM: And made it possible for this woman to open a jar of peanut butter.

CLAUDIA MITCHELL, BIONIC ARM PATIENT: That's all the things that are extremely difficult when you don't have that extra hand to get that done.

OPPENHEIM: Jesse Sullivan is a bionic man. Claudia Mitchell is a bionic woman. Real life versions of what was once science fiction on a TV show called "The Six Million Dollar Man." The story of an astronaut who learned to control artificial limbs after a terrible accident.

For these two, the reality is not so different. In May of 2001 Jesse, a lineman for a power company in Tennessee was seriously injured on the job.

SULLIVAN: I made contact with the live wire and the ground.

OPPENHEIM: How much electricity did your body take in.

SULLIVAN: Seven thousand, two hundred volts. Seventy-two hundred.

OPPENHEIM: What happened to your arms?

SULLIVAN: Cooked them.

OPPENHEIM: Both of Jesse's arms were amputated. Three years later, Claudia, a former U.S. Marine, was a passenger on a motorcycle in Arkansas, when her friend, the driver, lost control.

MITCHELL: I remember the terror right before. How he was thinking feeling that we were going to wreck.

OPPENHEIM: Claudia's left arm was severed, her life changed.

MITCHELL: I had trouble zipping up pants. I had trouble doing all the things that I could do on a daily basis.

OPPENHEIM: What Claudia and Jesse did not know at the time of their accidents was that research for bionic limbs was advancing to a new level.

DR. TODD KUIKEN, REHABILITATION INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO: We haven't spent $6 million yet. We hope to.

OPPENHEIM: For years, Dr. Todd Kuiken of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago had been developing an idea that accident victims could control their artificial limbs merely by thinking.

Consider that after Jesse's amputations, he used conventional prosthetics and controlled them with his body.

How do you open the hook on this arm?

SULLIVAN: Simply by shrugging my shoulders forward like so.

OPPENHEIM: But when Jesse met up with Dr. Kuiken, the goal was for Jesse to do even better with his mind. During surgery, Jesse was essentially rewired. His severed nerves, at once went to his arm and hand were redirected from his shoulder to muscles in his chest. The concept, patients merely think they want to move their arm or hand, then impulses from the brain make chest muscles contract, which in turn send impulses to an artificial limb.

KUIKEN: So we can pick up that electrical signal from the muscle and use that to go into a computer in the arm and tell the arm what to do.

SULLIVAN: All I have to do is want to do it and I can do it.

OPPENHEIM: Jesse became the first patient where a nerve muscle graft had been used to control an artificial limb.

Three years later Claudia became the first female to make the same claim.

MITCHELL: The first day we actually got it on and it started working, you couldn't get me to quit smiling.

OPPENHEIM: Both Claudia and Jesse have what doctors call take home arms, modified to respond to electrical impulses. The arms have three motors. Claudia and Jesse can bend elbows, turn wrists, open grip like hands and control it all by brain.

But several times a year they both come to Chicago to test drive a six motor arm made with parts from around the world. A hand from China, a wrist from Germany, a shoulder from Scotland. For now these prototypes are too fragile to take home but both Claudia and Jesse are excited by the promise of what they can control.

SULLIVAN: It's given me a freedom to be able to move it - to be able to move it - to me that is a big deal.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Open and close.

MITCHELL: After my wreck, you wouldn't have convinced me that I would have the latest and greatest in technology and that I would really be on the cutting edge of what's going on in the prosthetic world and it's just something that I can't express how thankful I am.

OPPENHEIM: They may be even more grateful. Incredible as it sounds, Dr. Kuiken hopes that research will progress even further and that soon both Claudia and Jesse will be rewired to perceive a sense of touch from an artificial arm.

Keith Oppenheim, CNN, Chicago.

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MANN: We take a break now. When we come back, getting beneath the surface using arts, music and technology to reach children with disabilities. GLOBAL CHALLENGES will return right after this.

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MANN: Welcome back to GLOBAL CHALLENGES and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There is no telling what the people who work here at other research centers around the world are going to come up with. Science takes us places we never thought possible. We have the story, now, for example, of one man whose skills took him in one direction until compassion took him in another.

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RALITSA VASSILEVA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): What if this aquarium was your world? A world you longed to dive into but could only observe through a glass wall. A disability can be just like that glass wall, restricting access to your environment. Canada's largest children's rehab center in Toronto tries to help kids with disabilities get around that wall.

Bloorview Kids Rehab cares for about 7,000 children with a variety of physical and developmental disabilities like cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, spina bifida and autism.

Thirteen year old Kejan Vinexvarin (ph) thought he'd never be able to play a single note on a piano. He has charcot marit 2 (ph), a degenerative neurological disorder causing muscle weakness and atrophy which keeps his hands frozen in fists. But thanks to his own abilities and an innovation developed by bioengineer Tom Chau of Bloorview's Prism Lab he is now tickling the ivories in a unique way.

The instrument works with the help of a camera and a computer that translates the child's movements into sounds.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You have to do like a circular motion, OK, so, like so .

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It happens sometimes.

VASSILEVA: Kejan discovered mastering the virtual music instrument, or VMI as he calls it, helps him achieve other goals.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If there is another challenge that is very hard to do I always think that I accomplished the VMI system, why can't I do this?

VASSILEVA: The boost in confidence is an unexpected benefit from a device which started off as a way to help children like Kijan exercise to maintain muscle mass.

Tom Chau leads the centers Prism Lab, a research group working to create technologies to help enable children with special needs.

TOM CHAU, BLOORVIEW KIDS REHAB: Children are OK to be the way they are. So we're not out there to change children or to fit them into typical molds, rather, we're challenging technology to learn and adapt to children.

VASSILEVA: Six years ago, after Chau had just become a father, he began having doubts about his lucrative corporate job.

CHAU: At the end of the day I started to wonder what it was all worth. So I was really drawn to something that had more of a human touch.

VASSILEVA: He contacted Bloorview and asked for a chance to prove he could tweak existing technologies and even make new ones to make a difference in young patients' lives. Bloorview said yes and the children and their families are the beneficiaries.

Chau says his mother set an example for her children by volunteering with terminally ill patients and getting her kids involved to.

(on camera): Dr. Chau realized early on that children with disabilities were like the rest of us unique individuals with their own needs, desires, talent and of course, limitations. What they needed was the right tool to express themselves and fulfill their potential. Dr. Chau focuses on what the children can do, not what they can't, and tries to find the right gadget to help them do even more.

(voice-over): This prototype is called the aspirometer. It has been tested by Dean Doprado (ph) and his family. Dean has cerebral palsy.

CHAU: Can I put this on your neck? Yeah, OK. It's really soft this one. Softer than the other one so what we would do is simply put it on like this and the piece of Velcro goes around, I'm not going to do it tight, just like that, just like that. All right.

And at the front of that little strap is a little sensor and that sensor measures the vibration in an in and out direction while Dean is feeding.

VASSILEVA: The sensor sends information to an electronic box that can distinguish between healthy and unhealthy swallowing.

CHAU: And so when the child would be aspirating this thing would sound an alarm and a light to warn the caregiver that the child is having difficulty.

VASSILEVA: Incorrect swallowing can lead to pneumonia and other problems. Being alerted of swallowing problems can give piece of mind to families and caregivers.

Chau and his team are tuning into muscle sounds to develop new prosthetics.

CHAU: And we have created a hand in the computer but we haven't built it yet but this hand, it looks like a real hand, doesn't it? And it can open and close.

VASSILEVA: Eight year old Megan Strissia (ph) was born with a limb deficiency. The team has developed a unique sensor that they hope will enable them to lock into the sound of each muscle and allow for individually controlled prosthetic fingers.

Tom Chau believes technology has an integral role in helping children with disabilities more fully engage in a world teeming with life and possibilities.

CHAU: There's lots of things these kids can do. We all need to be a little bit creative in terms of how we find a solution, what technologies we adapt and all of the sudden we've opened up a new world.

VASSILEVA: Relitsa Vassileva, CNN, for GLOBAL CHALLENGES in Toronto, Canada.

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MANN (on camera): And that's it for this edition of GLOBAL CHALLENGES. I'm Jonathan Mann, thanks for being with us, we'll see you next time.

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