He helped pioneer Google Glass
The craziest part? You don't even need to be paying attention to learn.
-The brain is capable of more than we know.
Researchers have taught people to play piano in less than an hour
To read Braille in just a couple hours.
And now they're asking an even bigger question.
Can we actually use this glove how people recover from traumatic brain injuries and get back to normal lives?
My daddy is everything, he's the best dad.
Katrina's dad Alex had a stroke, and as a result, he has extremely limited movement and sensation in his right hand.
One of the things that people don't realize that is that it's not being able to walk again that's their focus
It's being able to use our hands again. That's the focus because that's all about feeding yourself,
dressing yourself,
If you have your hands back that can significantly improve your quality of life.
That's Thad Starner. He's a professor at Georgia Tech. Back in the 90s,
he started wearing a computer on his face
and he was probably one of the first people to do that.
There's a lot of things we can do now with wearable computers that used to be science fiction.
Like in The Matrix. In that movie, Keanu Reeves learns new skills from a computer passively.
That's kind of what we're talking about here. But instead of plugging into a computer
Thad wants you to wear these gloves.
Meet Thad's colleague, Caitlyn.
-People say Thad is quirky, but I never really picked up on that.
So I guess I must be quirky too.
They started with piano.
The first thing we tried was conveying a simple melody on the piano
using wearable computing device in the form of a glove
So, basically these little gloves vibrate in the same finger pattern as a piano song.
This happens in the background while you do other stuff.
Then you sit down an hour later and you can magically play it.
When we were filming, I gave it a try.
Ok, so you can start with your middle finger on this key.
Perfect!
And it worked! -Very good!
it also worked for this weatherman on CNN.
-All I did was I played on my mouse. -Okay.
-I did my little hurricane stuff.
And it was buzzing on my fingers. -You were working.
I'll see if I can do it.
(music notes)
Oh, you gotta be kidding me.
Are you kidding me?
Now do you have any talent or background in music? Ever played piano?
(mashing keys)
In their experiments, they even tried hard to distract people wearing the gloves.
They made them take the SATs or GREs and people could still play the song.
even as they got more complicated--two hands.
(fast piano)
Mozart's Turkish March.
It still worked.
So Kaitlyn got an idea.
I thought what other applications
Had a need and could we apply this technique to?
Only 10% of blind people can read Braille.
The National Federation of the Blind considers this a literacy crisis.
For these individuals, Braille is their language, so it's a skill they really need to have.
It normally takes about four months to learn Braille
So Caitlyn wondered: What if they could speed that up?
I created a two glove system that taught each letter incrementally.
Just like the piano, they wore them in the background for a couple hours.
and these people who I taught to type Braille were able to read
94% of the Braille alphabet in under four hours.
(upbeat music)
Four months to four hours, that's pretty crazy.
-Beautiful, Brittany.
-That is awesome.
So, they sped up learning for piano and Braille.
What else could they do?
Thad had a friend Debbie who worked with people who had spinal cord injuries.
She saw the piano experiment.
-And Debbie said, "Why don't you use this on some of my patients?"
Debbie thought they might be able to restore some fine motor control in her patients' hands.
The brain will recruit more more neurons to explain the signals that are left over,
and help differentiate them and give them better sensation dexterity.
So they got some of Debbie's patients and had them come play the piano.
They gave half of them a glove to stimulate their disabled hand, and over eight weeks...
What we noticed was that those who took the glove home--
They showed improvements in sensation on their disabled hand.
One patient could only move one finger and he came out
Able to button his own buttons and that was just a revolution to us, right?
You know, if we can help with partial spinal cord break
What else can we can we work on?
And so of course the big one there is stroke.
(Crescendo)
Alex is one of a dozen or so participants in Caitlyn's most recent study.
He uses the gloves for about three hours every day during his normal routine
and every week Katelyn visits to test his movement and sensation
We'll have to wait for the final results until the study's complete, but so far, they're very promising.
This project with Georgia Tech has been extremely valuable because it gave us hope.
I do this work because I just really want to see improvement in the human condition.
This work is centered on problems that can be solved by technology.
I can't wait to see what we next uncover.