Common knowledge holds that humans have five senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – and that these are mutually exclusive. However, there has been significant scientific research on the phenomenon of sensory substitution, where a sense is able to compensate for another that is compromised. This is due to the brain’s plasticity, which allows it to adapt to a changing environment, including a loss of a sense. Multiple studies have shown that the areas of the brain that govern sight undergo changes following the loss of sight, allowing these to be activated by other senses.
Several technologies have explored this phenomenon, such as BrainPort, which transfers pictures from a camera to a user through electrotactile stimulation of the user's tongue. Amazingly, the brain’s plasticity allows people to receive visual information through the sense of touch, and still interpret it as vision. Another device, Buzz, transforms audio information from a microphone into vibration signals on the wrist, which the brain can interpret as sound, allowing deaf people to hear.
Serial entrepreneur and academic Peter Idestam-Almquist, PhD was fascinated by these developments, which led him to establish xTactor, a company that seeks to develop practical solutions that can make communication more inclusive and convenient for people who have sensory impairment.
Idestam, who obtained his PhD in artificial intelligence in 1993, has founded three companies prior to xTactor in various industries, namely web technology, consulting, and databases. After selling his holdings in the third company, he returned to academia, and his interest in neuroscience and artificial intelligence led him to research brain-computer interfaces, which involves alternative ways of communication between the brain and a computer, bypassing the traditional senses such as sight and hearing.
However, some of the brain-computer interface technologies being developed today, such as brain implants, can be quite invasive and impractical. Idestam says that harnessing simpler, already-present technology has the potential to bring immediate benefits to users.
Idestam says that, while he is an expert in software, AI, and neuroscience, he did not have any knowledge in hardware engineering. He partnered with his nephew, Ante Larsson, an engineer from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, to build several prototype solutions. Eventually, they found out that it was quite easy for people to understand messages given as vibrations in Morse Code, so they founded xTactor in 2018 to make their technology available to everyone.
The company is developing its first product, known as xBand, which is a wristband with a companion app that catches notifications, calls, and texts from the user’s smartphone and sends them as Morse Code vibrations, leaving the user’s eyes, ears, and hands free to focus on more important tasks.
xBand is very useful for visually impaired people, allowing communication in various situations where existing assistive technologies are inadequate. According to Idestam, there are multiple disadvantages to the common tools used by people with visual impairment to communicate with a smartphone. For example, braille displays can be large and unwieldy, while screen readers and voice commands are suited only for quiet areas and could have privacy risks.
Users of xBand are informed not only of the arrival of a call or text message but also who was calling/texting, as well as the content of the message. For lengthy messages, xBand uses artificial intelligence to summarize it into a few words, providing the user a preview of the content and allows them to decide whether to read the full text now or later.
While there is a learning curve for Morse Code, it is widely used because it is efficient and relatively easy to learn. The xBand app comes with a training module that will help users pick up Morse Code faster.
xBand allows for two-way communication, with buttons that enable the user to send commands in Morse Code to their phone, including typing a text message, requesting the current time or setting an alarm.
For xBand’s next generation, xTactor is also working on a new input method. It will measure the voltage differences on the wrist and detect the nervous system’s electrical impulses for the muscles controlling the fingers, allowing the device to read finger movements for text messages or commands. Machine learning interprets these signals into Morse Code and relays them to the smartphone.
In June, xTactor was named one of the six winners of an innovation competition held by the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS), with a theme of “communication for all”. The accolade recognized the company’s efforts to make communication more inclusive, as well as the technology’s huge potential for other applications. xTactor received 3 million SEK, or around 270,000 US Dollars, from the government agency to fund its R&D and production operations.
“xTactor’s guiding principle is that we believe in communication beyond seeing and hearing,” Idestam says. “We are developing technology that supports other ways of communication that aren’t dependent on a user’s eyes or ears. In the creation of xBand, we work with individuals who already communicate with their smartphones using little or no sight, to ensure that our product best serves the needs of people, not only those with a visual impairment, but everyone.”
Media contact:
Name: Peter Idestam-Almquist
Email: [email protected]
