A vibrating vest could provide a new way to communicate for deaf people

It really is a vest, but calling it that is actually an acronym for Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer (VEST). So that worked out well.

This technological garment, which looks more like a circuit board than outerwear, was created by neuroscientist David Eagleman. The concept is that the sound of a person’s voice when they speak, the different pitches and other frequencies, are translated into vibrations that a person can feel through the back of the VEST.

Although it’s still sense of touch that is going on, he says it’s sort of like a sixth sense because we have never used sensations on our torso to convey information.

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“This is a way to get information into the brain by feeling it – feeling data,” he explained to CNN‘s Rachel Crane.

His hope is that this could be used as another form of communication for deaf people – an alternative to the cochlear implant. The cochlear implant is $40,000, as Eagleman points out, and it is an invasive procedure. He believes the VEST could be consumer ready for just a few thousand dollars.

And this could go beyond being used by deaf people, as Eagleman explains. This, for example, could eventually be used by astronauts to feed real time data to their bodies about what’s going on with the machinery around them and back on earth.

“There’s no reason that we can’t really become essentially trans-human in the sense that we rise above the traditional sensors that we have and traditionally what it means to be human,” he says.