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In the past decades, Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) have been widely used as a research tool to unravel the properties of the sensory brain. Although their rehabilitation potential is repeatedly demonstrated, SSDs were never widely adopted by blind individuals in everyday life, except for a few super-users’ cases. One reason explaining this gap is the lack of structured SSD training programs for everyday use. We thus developed an ambitious computerized SSD training program using the EyeMusic visual-to-auditory SSD and gathered 10 blind participants to test its efficiency. Participants were trained to identify pictures of real objects from different categories (e.g., furniture). For each category, we tested the performance of participants before training and again after 10 hours of dedicated training. The test included both trained and untrained stimuli. The 10 hours training program involved a combination of static stimuli and dynamic computer games and was individually adapted to participants’ learning pace. Initial results show that after training, participants achieved significantly higher accuracy rates in object recognition compared to baseline for trained and most importantly, for untrained objects from the same category. This further supports the suitability of SSDs in everyday life, and thus propels their adoption for this purpose.

Is it possible to quickly and reliably understand the position of objects in space without vision? This is one of the biggest challenge blind people face daily. We developed a novel algorithm called the Topo-Speech which conveys the spatial position of objects via speech manipulations. We ran a pilot study on blindfolded sighted adults (n=5) to test the extent to which users can locate objects’ spatial positions after short training with the Topo-Speech, as well as their ability to locate untrained spatial positions. Participants were trained for ~30 minutes on the detection of objects’ positions on a 3x3 grid. Then they were tested on the same spatial locations (though using different stimuli). Finally, participants were tested on identifying the positions of objects on a 5x5 grid (i.e. additional spatial locations) without any specific training. Our results showed that participants performed significantly above chance for both trained and untrained spatial positions. This in turn suggests the feasibility of the Topo-Speech to convey spatial related information via a non-visual channel and prompt to quickly test such approach with people who are visually impaired.