With Wires, the Disabled Gain Control
From: NY Times - April 24, 2003
By: Michel Marriott


A gentle wave of oohs, ahs and chuckles rolled through a Fairleigh Dickinson
University classroom as a computer science professor repeatedly grimaced
while demonstrating a computer program he had just written. A sensor was
taped to his forehead, allowing him to send commands merely by furrowing his
brow. 

The giggles notwithstanding, Eamon Doherty was not playing it for laughs.
Although the students were huddling over toys - robotic arms they had
assembled from hobbyist kits - the session was serious business. 

"We're going to make a program to control that," Dr. Doherty said
matter-of-factly as he shared his programming language for manipulating
robotic arms, projected digitally onto a traditional blackboard. "We're just
going to send different signals." Pausing to wrinkle his forehead, he
elicited a beep and then an action from the multijointed plastic robotic arm.
A moment later, it lurched forward. 

"You'll be able to do that type of thing," Dr. Doherty, a 39-year-old
assistant professor, promised with the air of a celebrity chef sharing the
secrets of an exquisite sauce. 

Formerly an information systems employee for the Morris County, NJ,
government who fixed computers and taught PC skills to county prison inmates,
Dr. Doherty arrived on the university's campus in Teaneck in the fall of 2001
and quickly developed a reputation as more than an educator. He is known as a
sort of 21st-century Geppetto who refashions toys, computer chips and
assorted circuits into useful tools for a group that has largely been
excluded from the PC revolution: the severely disabled.  

Dr. Doherty and his students dissect toys and outfit them with computer
components and programming to enable people who have lost the use of their
hands to dial the phone or browse the Internet. Other creations allow the
bedridden to take a virtual walk around their homes by deploying toy dogs
saddled with wireless video cameras that beam images back to computer
monitors. 

Last month Dr. Doherty and several students tested a computer-based
communications system that they had designed and built for Walter Engel, a
47-year-old resident of Englewood, N.J., who is paralyzed from the neck down
as a result of a stroke. The system, using the same kind of facial sensor
that the professor demonstrated on campus, permits Mr. Engel to dial a
telephone and speak, either by relying on stored words and phrases or by
using the sensor to type out words to be spoken with a built-in voice
synthesizer. 

Next month, Dr. Doherty said, he and his students will install the equipment,
including a donated low-powered computer, in Mr. Engel's home. 

Communicating through his nurse this week with a complex system of eye blinks
that locate letters on a special board, Mr. Engel praised Dr. Doherty's
research. 

"We don't realize how great the human body is until something drastic happens
to it," he said. "After becoming a quad, I felt all was lost until I realized
with the use of computer and robotics one can live a healthy and meaningful
life.'' 

By using Dr. Doherty's system, "I was able to control a computer mouse by
electrical impulses from my brain," Mr. Engel said. With research into such
technology continuing, he added, "the future looks very promising for people
with brain stem injuries."  

Dr. Doherty, who has a doctorate in bioelectrical interfaces from the
University of Sunderland in England, has been fascinated with electronics
since his teenage years in Morris County, tinkering early on with ham radios
and later with the primitive precursors to today's personal computers. 

His interest in using electronics to help people, especially the disabled,
sprang from an early hardship of his own. At 17, he was burned in "a
high-voltage accident," he said, opening his hands to reveal palms thickened
with skin grafts and scar tissue. Walking on a strip of land near railroad
tracks, he lost his footing and reached for what he thought were heavy vines
to steady himself. The vines turned out to be downed high-voltage utility
lines. 

It took years of therapy and rehabilitation for him to regain full use of his
hands. "I had to have somebody do everything for me," he said, "so I can
relate to what that's like."  

One finger is missing and another is bent so that it resembles the letter C.
"I learned how to adapt like anyone else," Dr. Doherty said. "I don't let it
stop me."  

After earning a master's degree in computer science, he was tutoring
community college students in mathematics in Morris County when he met Bruce
Davis, a quadriplegic who was a fellow tutor. 

"He only had movement in his head," said Dr. Doherty, recalling watching Mr.
Davis teach class in 1989. "He'd tell a student, 'You pick up that book,'
another one, 'You write this on the board, you collect the homework.' He did
a pretty amazing job.' " 

Dr. Doherty suggested to his colleague that he might find a computer useful.
But the conventional interface, a keyboard, was obviously impractical for Mr.
Davis. So Dr. Doherty began exploring hands-free means of controlling a
computer. 

"He taught me codes to use and he gave me a special microphone that I could
use," said Mr. Davis, now 57. "It was quite ingenious."  

In Dr. Doherty's office, a long, narrow space that was once a school
chemistry lab, the professor gestured toward a hulking robotic arm, an Army
surplus model that uses hydraulics rather than the tiny electric motors that
animate his students' toy robot arms. He said he was reprogramming the arm so
that Mr. Davis could control it with a facial electrode linked to a computer
in a telebotics study Dr. Doherty is conducting. 

The robotic camera will have a Webcam connected to it so that Mr. Davis can
see what it is doing. 

"We want to show that even with facial impulses someone can operate remotely
equipment for a possible job," Dr. Doherty said. 

"It's a real beauty," he said. He estimated that the arm probably cost about
$75,000 when it was new. He bought it for $250 from a man in a local camera
shop who had overheard him talking with the cashier about his work with the
disabled. 

"The guy was into robotics," Dr. Doherty said of the chance encounter. "And
he just happened to be in the camera store when I was there."  

But many of Dr. Doherty's friends and associates say he makes his own good
luck with his seemingly inexhaustible drive to integrate computers and
robotics into everyday living, especially for the disabled. 

Among his admirers is John Iovine, the research director for Images SI, a
company in Staten Island that builds and sells robotic devices and
accessories for light industry and hobbyists. Mr. Iovine said that when he
learned of Dr. Doherty's work two years ago, he set out to collaborate with
him. Although they have not met face to face, Mr. Iovine communicates
frequently with Dr. Doherty by telephone and e-mail, offering him discounts
on products or custom-designing circuits that the professor needs at no cost. 

"He's getting kids while they're in college seeing the technology and the
possibilities," Mr. Iovine said of Dr. Doherty. "It's invaluable, what he's
doing."  

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/technology/circuits/24tink.html?ex=1052193912&ei=1&en=ed9ad21e220ca1bb

Contributed by Marsha Allen