Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have built a system that turns a human tongue into a joystick or computer mouse, so that disabled users can control their wheelchairs or computer desktops with their mouths.
The researchers, led by Maysam Ghovanloo, an assistant professor in the institute’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, have already built a prototype that uses the tongue-control system to manipulate an electric wheelchair. And the system is cheaper than those that track eye movements to control machines — another approach under development.
(Photograph by Gary Meek, Courtesy of Georgia Tech)
The system gives users far more control than the popular “sip and puff” technique in which people issue commands to computers by breathing into a tube, according to a report in the Associated Press. —Jeffrey R. Young
4 Responses to Georgia Tech Researchers Design Tongue-Powered Computer for Disabled
gasstationwithoutpumps - May 17, 2012 at 1:14 pm
I think what UMN is proposing is not “peer review” but “book review” of the sort that is commonly published in library and academic journals. That is, an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of a book after it has been published. This sort of review has a long history and is quite valuable—$500 seems like a reasonable price to pay for a well-written analysis of a textbook by an expert teacher of the subject.
Robert Oscar Lopez - May 18, 2012 at 5:30 pm
It is only peer review if it happens before publication, period. Reviews afterwards are just reviews and won’t likely tip the scales in a personnel review unless it’s a scholar’s borderline case. Many of the departments that are strict about peer review also dont count textbooks anyway; they expect monographs, at least in my discipline.
impendia2 - May 20, 2012 at 7:47 am
Richard Feynman had a great story about just how sacrosanct and serious the old system was:
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
mkt42 - May 21, 2012 at 6:35 am
I agree that what’s going on here is not peer review but rather “peer validation” (or simply “book review” as gasstationwithoutpumps says). Peer review is invaluable during the book writing/editing process, to weed out inaccuracies, ambiguities, and outright errors. Book reviews are useful to help instructors get some vague notion of the strengths and weaknesses of each book.
But for textbooks, the bottom line is pretty easy: the instructor looks at the candidate textbooks and chooses the one that he or she likes best (taking price into account too, one hopes). The other sorts of review are distinctly secondary in importance.