Harlan Jacobs is no stranger to unusual technology ventures. As president and founder of Genesis Business Centers Ltd. in Columbia Heights, his for-profit, high-tech incubator has provided business-growth consulting and chief financial officer services to many companies with a particular strength in the life science and medical-device sectors for the last 14 years.
One of his current partners, Tokyo-based EyePlusPlus, offers an intriguing vision: sight for the blind and those with debilitated vision.
At least, it’s a form of sight.
The technology—what EyePlusPlus calls a Forehead Retina System (FRS)—uses a small camera mounted on lightweight sunglasses to translate images of the wearer’s environment into electrical impulses that are then changed into tactile feelings on the forehead via a headband outfitted with 512 electrodes. The electrical stimuli on the forehead creates a constantly evolving “picture” the user can feel. In this way, FRS users can “see” their environment.
“It requires an appropriate training,” says Yonezo Kanno, co-founder of EyePlusPlus, “just as reading Braille requires training.”
The Braille system uses cells of six dots with different raised-dot combinations to create the alphabet, punctuation, and even shorthand words. It serves as an apt comparison to the FRS technology. They are both tactile approaches to helping blind and sight debilitated people with a way to interpret information. The forehead is one o the more sensitive parts of the body. Users of the EyePlusPlus device must hone their skills to interpret stimuli to the forehead to the point that they can be read for depth and the presence of obstacles.
A positive reception of the technology bodes well. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 161 million people with visual impairment; of them, 37 million are blind.
The Road to Minnesota
Kanno and his technology arrived in Minnesota through a personal connection he made at a venture capital meeting in Cleveland. He also established ties with Minnesota during two Minneapolis sister-city missions to Japan.
“In February 2005, EyePlusPlus was established by myself and Dr. Susumu Tachi of the University of Tokyo,” Kanno says. The two men split patents with Kanno’s regarding the use of electrical stimuli on the forehead to translate physical obstacles to tactile sensations and Dr. Tachi’s regarding the base translation technology.
Kanno’s good friend Takao Murakami became a board member of the fledgling EyePlusPlus venture. At the time, his wife, Linda Mae Murakami, lived in Minneapolis.
“She introduced me to the Minnesota State Academy for the Blind (MSAB),” Kanno says of the Fairbault-based school. That was in August 2005. “Since then the staff of MSAB, including blind and persons with low vision, have cooperated in the development of the FRS,” he says.
Feeling is Believing
It’s a fascinating technology,” says Olda Boubin, MSAB’s director of education. “Think about what a door opening looks like. Transfer that to a forehead sensation. Now you can begin to visualize your surroundings,” he says. “For someone losing their sight, this sort of technology could really aid in transition.”
This is the first instance Boubin recalls of a manufacturer of a sight-aid technology approaching MSAB directly to request product feedback ahead of the market. And Boubin has gone so far as to take the device home to experiment with it.
“I’ve walked down streets in it,” he says. “It works at night and during the day. When you combine it with your sense of sound—which is heightened when you put a blindfold on—it’s quite interesting. [The camera] shoots five, ten feet ahead of you. That’s something a cane can’t do. You get a stronger sensation the closer you are to things,” he says, referring to the stimuli on the forehead as you approach an object, such as a wall.
The education process will differ for people who have had sight and those who never have, Boubin says. Although the FRS technology has good potential, Boubin says canes will still be primary travel tools for visually impaired and blind people.
Device Debut
A few months after Kanno was introduced to MSAB, he met with Harlan Jacobs in Cleveland.
“I offered to visit him in Tokyo,” Jacobs says. By good fortune, Jacobs had already planned a trip to Japan as part of the Mayor Rybak-led delegation to Minneapolis’ Japanese sister city, Ibaraki. “[Kanno and I] struck up a good working relationship,” Jacobs says. “He visited us over here steadily then and we developed a good trust in anticipation that he might make Minnesota his U.S. base of operations and seek equity capital here.”
Jacobs is now the part-time chief financial officer for EyePlusPlus in the United States, managing its general operations, Kanno says. “We are now arranging our best partners on manufacturing and marketing in Minnesota,” he says.
The United States is the first market EyePlusPlus intends to target with its FRS technology. “We are almost ready to apply for the FDA 510(k) submission,” Kanno says. (This section of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires medical device manufacturers to notify the Food and Drug Administrations 90 days before the company intends to start marketing the device, so that it can be properly classified.)
Kanno hopes to acquire approval by the end of September and to initiate unit production in November or December. Initial estimates are that the first units may cost around $5,000 for the consumer.
The EyePlusPlus office is being set up at the Elliot Park Lifesciences Institute, with help from the Genesis’ incubator program and the Minneapolis Lifesciences Corridor, a partnership of hospitals, and research and clinical laboratories.
And Kanno is excited. Not only is the initial technology advancing steadily towards market, additional tactile uses have been recognized—though understandably he’s keeping his cards close to his vest.
“We have a plan for the practical implementation of the technology beyond successfully introducing it as gear for the blind,” he says. “This could be for video games, professional tools for rescue squads, and tactile displays for astronauts working in the space.”
