A moment ago, I was reading about Robert Smithdas, the first deaf and blind person ever to be awarded a master’s degree. After reading about him, I couldn’t help but think back to my time in college – how it could be difficult, how little ambition and drive I sometimes seemed to have and how I sometimes couldn’t wait for class to end so I could go out with friends – and I can’t help but feel a combination of personal shame (for having taken my experience of sight and sound for granted) and admiration. I can’t imagine learning what a word is without hearing or sight, let along combining words, word problems, math problems and all of the other things that you learn in school. Mr. Smithdas found a way to overcome the absence of those two senses and made it all the way through graduate school.
Test chambers. I haven’t forgotten that this blog is about test chambers. They are used to simulate environmental conditions in order to test a variable or a set of variables. A test chamber can be designed to reproduce environmental conditions like air temperature, humidity, particulate volume and they can even be used to reproduce the experiences of hearing loss or blindness. Robert Smithdas, because he was born long before today’s advanced hearing and sight loss experimental technologies were conceived, didn’t have the benefit of those technologies. But today, researchers are using test chambers and other technologies to study the brain and sensory organs in order to find if there is a way to mend them when they go wrong. Test chambers can also be used to help people with sensory disabilities find other ways to learn and understand their environments.
In the case of people who suffer from deafness and blindness, experimental technologies that involve vibration at rhythmic intervals have been developed that can allow deaf and blind users to learn and communicate with Morse Code.
Test chambers aren’t used only for product testing and development; they also are creating avenues to learning and communication for people with disabilities.
