If we go to any journalism school and ask one of their students, most of them will know Canadian Marshall McLuhan . This communication theorist coined the well-known phrase “the medium is the message”, referring to the importance of the way in which we receive information.
Much less known are other ideas of his, such as the one that refers to technologies as extensions of the human senses . Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and technology, in the broadest sense of the term and as McLuhan envisioned, is managing to repair these abilities when they are damaged or , even improve them when they are in good condition. Artificial intelligence, new materials, microsurgery, nanotechnology or big data configure a new sensory generation.
View
Although all the senses are important, if we think about our day to day without one of them, the sight would be the last we want to lose. Technology in the field of vision has come a long way in the last decade and today encompasses lenses to improve vision, visual simulators to correct defects in the eye, and augmented reality , which uses devices to combine digital content with the real world.
For people who suffer from different types of blindness, there are also retinal chips , an artificial vision system that electrically stimulates nerve cells in the retina, replacing damaged photoreceptor cells to transmit visual information to the brain through the optic nerve.
Could they serve to improve healthy capacities and have supervision? Enrique Josua Fernández, professor at the University Institute for Research in Optics and Nanophysics at the University of Murcia and head of the Vision Sciences committee of the Spanish Optical Society, is skeptical. “ The implantation of these chips is carried out surgically, so it is a very invasive process with risks. The potential benefits of these implants in healthy people in the future, such as increased and extended sensitivity to other frequencies outside the visible spectrum, I do not think they compensate ”, he maintains.
In parallel, optogenetics is also making important advances in treating brain-related disorders. Based on beams of light, this technology is being tested for those with age-related macular degeneration , which causes vision loss in those over the age of fifty.
In the field of lenses, a team of Israeli scientists has incorporated ultra-thin optical devices, known as metasurfaces, into standard contact lenses to correct a type of color blindness, specifically, that suffered by people who have trouble distinguishing red from green . Among its main advantages is customization.
“Our device offers a tailored optical response and therefore we can optimize it for each person,” explains Sharon Karepov, a researcher in the Department of Physical Electronics at Tel Aviv University.
Other types of devices are aimed at forgetting the glasses and correcting defects such as tired eyesight , which occurs when, with age, the lens becomes more rigid, losing its ability to focus on objects dynamically. A new lens designed by CSIC scientists is capable of replicating the ability of the young lens to dynamically accommodate the vision of distant and close objects.
On the other hand, if there is an example of innovative technology that did not meet the expectations generated, it is known as smart glasses. In Fernández’s opinion, their failure is explained because they had no specific applications. Regarding aesthetics, although the designs have evolved, they do not quite integrate well in simple frames, to which are added problems related to privacy and security. “We find it disturbing to talk or interact with someone who may be registering our image,” says the expert.
Augmented reality is not taking off either, although it has become fashionable again during the coronavirus pandemic. “Its appeal is in getting a computer to interpret your environment and place digital objects naturally in the scene,” describes Stephen Hicks, co-founder and Director of Innovation at the English company OxSight, which develops smart glasses to help people with visual impairments. .
Scientists are also investigating how to replace energy-intensive, light-wasting mobile phone screens with a display device close to the eye that reduces this energy consumption. This is precisely what Christopher Martínez, a research engineer in the Optics and Photonics department of the French Commission for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energy, does. “Our goal is not to improve the sense of sight, but to find out how we can help people manage the flow of visual information that we have today,” he says.
Smell
In the same way that we now share an image or an audio through our mobile phone, the engineers strive so that we will soon be able to exchange smells . A first step is artificial noses , like the one Tai Hyun Park and his team of Korean scientists have designed.
The device is a bioelectronic nose capable of detecting food in the early stages of decomposition, although the tool could also be used to help find victims of natural disasters.
“Humans have approximately 400 functional olfactory receptors in the nose. The first step in detecting an odor is the binding of odor molecules to these receptors, ”says Hyun Park, who is director of the Faculty of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University (South Korea). The same function would be fulfilled by these sensors in an artificial nose. To achieve this, the researchers have reproduced them in a bacterial system, embedding the receptors on nanodisks.
This type of device is the most innovative in terms of smell, according to Markus Antonietti, director of the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces (Germany). “Think of a sensor that can smell like a dog, that is drugs, food poisoning, traces of lost people, even cancer or many other diseases, ” he lists. In his opinion, this tool could transform current security problems and even health systems, by including the information perceived by olfactory sensors in the medical records of patients.
In the field of health, an electronic nose tested on 143 patients in the Netherlands with an advanced type of lung cancer identified with 85% accuracy those who would respond well to immunotherapy, which stimulates the immune system to attack the tumor. The nose – baptized as eNose – detected in the exhaled air the presence of a protein, PD-L1, which helps prevent immune cells from attacking healthy cells.
Cancers with high levels of PD-L1 can often be treated with immunotherapy, whereas if the patient does not have elevated levels of the protein, the treatment will not be effective. The advantage of the electronic nose is that it avoids other invasive methods used until now to detect the protein such as biopsies.
Gusto
“Compared to smell, relatively few specific treatments for taste disorders have been published, although different approaches have been proposed for symptomatic relief,” says Adriana Izquierdo-Domínguez, allergologist and member of the Spanish Society of Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery (SEORL-CCC).
Like noses, engineers are developing artificial languages with different applications. One of them is detecting spicy flavors that would be too intense for our delicate taste buds and damage their sensitivity. An electronic language designed by researchers at Washington State University could be used to differentiate the spiciness of food.
Along these lines, an international team of scientists with the participation of the University of Granada is creating a virtual language to predict the taste of food . Within the framework of the European project VIRTUOUS, they combine agri-food sciences with artificial intelligence to create a flavor predictor that can be applied to European foods. The proposed algorithm, which integrates techniques used in pharmacology and big data, will be able to predict the organoleptic profile of a food based on its chemical composition.
For the next twenty-five years, Antonietti envisions a kind of “artificial chef” helping us cook by providing feedback on flavor in an objective way. This involves designing household devices that verify the quality of food, adjusting, for example, their current expiration dates, which would lead to better food safety in the long run.
Touch
Confinement due to the coronavirus pandemic has reminded us of a sense that not many animals have: that of touch. In recent years, technology has explored how to restore this ability to people who, through accident or illness, have lost it .
A team of scientists has designed an electronic dermis – which they have named e-dermis – capable of transmitting the sensation of touch and even pain to a prosthetic hand. “With our multi-layered approach, we were able to mimic the behavior of nociceptors (receptors in the skin that transmit pain) and mechanoreceptors (that transmit pressure) in a single device on the fingertip of a prosthetic hand,” details Luke Osborn. , researcher in intelligent systems at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (USA).
The e-dermis , which is described in the journal Science , electrically stimulates the peripheral nerves in a person’s arm that has been amputated. And it does it non-invasively, through the skin. “We are exploring how to better encode electrical nerve stimulation to create more natural sensations,” adds Osborn.
In healthy people, the technology wants to go one step further and seeks to emulate electroreception : a biological ability of some species, especially aquatic ones, with which they use electric fields to locate prey and locate themselves in space.
“For example, you put on something like a one-finger glove, you point in one direction and your finger, when touching a transducer, tells you if a person, a heat source or a radio source is in that direction, ” says Antonietti. .
Hearing
If there is one tool that has revolutionized hearing, it has been cochlear implants . Indicated for different types of deafness, they transform acoustic signals into electrical signals that stimulate the auditory nerve. “This is a technology that is in continuous evolution, which allows the hearing results to be better and better “, highlights María José Lavilla, president of the Audiology Commission of SEORL-CCC.
For those cases in which it is not possible to place these devices because there is no auditory nerve, it is very small or the cochlea has problems, surgeons place brainstem implants between the brain stem and the cerebellum, which directly stimulate the auditory nuclei.
Along with this technology that has developed notably in recent years, there are also active middle ear implants , which capture sound to transform and amplify it, producing a series of mechanical vibrations that reach the ossicle chain or the fluids of the ear. internal. “They represent an alternative to hearing aids or conventional reconstructive surgery of the middle ear when the expected results are not obtained,” says Luis Lassaletta, president of the Otology Commission of SEORL-CCC.
And a third innovative invention is bone conduction implants , which transmit sound by bone conduction directly to the inner ear. As Lassaletta explains, they consist of an external processor with a microphone that captures the sound and transmits it to the implant, which will vibrate the bone of the skull and the fluids of the inner ear, using the body’s natural ability to transmit sound through the tissue. osseous.
“In addition to these surgical devices, hearing aid technology has evolved substantially,” Lavilla recalls. Analog hearing aids have given way to digital ones , in which an algorithm processes the acoustic signal, adapting automatically to elaborate the best response according to the acoustic environment in which the person is. To this are added the hearing aids and headphones that use the bone conduit to transmit sound.
Another novelty is the open-fit headphones , which are increasingly used and which, unlike bulky hard plastic devices, include a lightweight rubber or silicone tip that results in greater comfort and improves hearing. “It allows a person to listen more comfortably for a longer period of time, which is likely to broaden the range of activities they can enjoy,” says Matthew Winn, Professor of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at the University. from Minnesota.
The expert also remembers a simple gesture that we can do today and that helps millions of people, with or without hearing problems: the possibility of slowing down the speed of the videos when we play them with a simple click. It can also be a help for those who speak a different language or who have to transcribe what they have heard.
Finally, Adrian KC Lee, professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington, highlights the application of augmented reality and other tools that monitor what people without hearing problems read and listen to.
Just like virtual assistants like Siri that use artificial intelligence to help us on a day-to-day basis, in the future there will be hearing devices capable of replaying something that we have heard and that we want to hear again or that will help us automatically depending on what that we have heard. “This is more futuristic, but I think it is something that companies are actively investigating,” concludes the teacher. One more device for the new sensory generation.
