Neosensory Clarify

Interesting concept @billgem, it would be even more interesting if we had some user’s on here…. Thank you for the link, cheers Kev

I’m looking forward to your report!

@d_Wooluf said:

Seems almost implausible enough to be plausible?

Not so implausible to me. Sensory substitution has merit. Research is ongoing, and I think the most robust area is probably in providing various sensory alternatives for individuals who are blind. I’ve seen some interesting stuff about converting video to audio so that people can learn to ‘see’ the world by hearing it, or likewise through tactile stimulation to the back or the tongue. It’s neat stuff. Currently it seems to requires considerable training to get limited function.

Where it gets snake-oily is when it takes one vaguely positive study and inflates the marketting claims to sell a $1000 device. Or takes a body of work on some more complex devices using different stimulation in different areas and claims that it can get the same results with a wristband. I expect that the environmental awareness component may be more realistic than the tinnitus component. Some of the claims that they are making on the environmental awareness front is that people with hearing loss wearing the device become aware of sounds in the environment that they are missing (cuz their wrist buzzes) and then realize that they need hearing aids. Okay. I would expect that with consistent wear and training, someone might be able to recognize sounds through the wrist band, but I have no idea how specifically and after how much training. On the tinnitus side, the literature is pretty weak. The research they cite is, again, very different from the wristband, and the one study with the wristband doesn’t show a clinically significant effect over the control group.

Sensory substitution is interesting enough to me that I personally tried to hunt out a device that would vibrate in response to the magnetic field and see whether there might be a cool trianing effect that persisted after I stopped wearing the device. But the device was some $5000. I feel that right now trying this stuff is worth the amount of money that I might spend ‘on a lark’, but not yet worth serious money. What that amount of money is is going to be different from person to person depending on their bank account. If someone here has $1000 of fun money laying about and is willing to commit to wearing a chunky wristband consistently for months, I’d be interested to hear about their experience.

So, in my estimation, not as snake-oily as acupuncture and it’s robust negative literature, but not really solid either.