Bats Help Blind Man Across Street
Indirectly. A zoologist in the UK was inspired by bats' use of sound to locate objects in the dark. The result: a sonar-enabled walking stick for the visually impaired.

According to a September update from the journal Nature, designer Dean Waters got interested in applying the "echolocation" skills of bats, in which they bounce high-pitched off flying bugs and "work out the distance to dinner by timing the echo's return -- a long delay means the snack is far away."

Waters' system chirps at 60,000 cycles per second -- well above the range of human hearing -- and mounts on a standard white cane. The strength of the returning reflections is converted to vibrations on four pulsating pads on the stick's handle. With some training, users can learn to recognize how close obstacles are.

Commercial development is expected by the end of 2003, with a price expected to be around $600.

Read the Nature article

Visit Dean Waters at his University of Leeds web page