Category: Science

Frequently adding salt to foods was associated with an increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes in a new study.

People at risk for type 2 diabetes may already know to avoid sugar, but the study suggests they may want to skip the salt as well.

The study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings surveyed more than 400,000 adults registered in the UK Biobank about their salt intake. Over a median of 11.8 years of follow-up, more than 13,000 cases of type 2 diabetes developed among participants.

Compared to those who “never” or “rarely” used salt, participants who “sometimes,” “usually,” or “always” added salt had a respective 13%, 20%, and 39% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

“We already know that limiting salt can reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and hypertension, but this study shows for the first time that taking the saltshaker off the table can help prevent type 2 diabetes as well,” says lead author Lu Qi, professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

Further research is needed to determine why high salt intake could be linked to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. However, Qi believes salt encourages people to eat larger portions, increasing the chances of developing risk factors such as obesity and inflammation.

The study found an association between frequent consumption of salt and higher BMI and waist-to-hip ratio.

Qi says the next step is to conduct a clinical trial controlling the amount of salt participants consume and observing the effects.

Still, Qi says it’s never too early to start searching for low-sodium ways to season your favorite foods.

“It’s not a difficult change to make, but it could have a tremendous impact on your health,” Qi says.

Source: Tulane University

Findings indicate that an electric knifefish shimmies in the water for the same reason a dog sniffs or a human glances around a new place—to make sense of their surroundings.

For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that a wide range of organisms, even microbes, perform the same pattern of movements in order to sense the world. The research, which has implications for cognition and robotics, appears in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

“Amoeba don’t even have a nervous system, and yet they adopt behavior that has a lot in common with a human’s postural balance or fish hiding in a tube,” says study author Noah Cowan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “These organisms are quite far apart from each other in the tree of life, suggesting that evolution converged on the same solution through very different underlying mechanisms.”

The findings stem from the researchers’ efforts to figure out what the nervous system does when animals move to improve their perception of the world, and whether that behavior could be translated to robotic control systems.

While watching electric knifefish in an observation tank, the researchers noticed how when it was dark, the fish shimmied back and forth significantly more frequently. When lights were on, the fish swayed gently with only occasional bursts of rapid movement.

Knifefish in the wild are hardwired to find refuge to avoid predators. They emit weak electric discharges to sense their location and find shelter. Wiggling rapidly allows them to actively sense their surroundings, especially in dark water. In the light, they still make such rapid movements, just far less frequently.

“We found that the best strategy is to briefly switch into explore mode when uncertainty is too high, and then switch back to exploit mode when uncertainty is back down,” says first author and postdoctoral researcher Debojyoti Biswas.

This is the first time scientists deciphered this mode-switching strategy in fish. It’s also the first time anyone has linked this behavior across species.

The team created a model that simulates the key sensing behaviors, and using work from other labs, spotted the same sensory dependent movements in other organisms. Creatures that shared the behavior with the fish included amoeba, moths, cockroaches, moles, bats, mice, and humans.

“Not a single study that we found in the literature violated the rules we discovered in the electric fish, not even single-celled organisms like amoeba sensing an electric field,” Cowan says.

Scientists are just beginning to understand how animals control sensing movements unconsciously. The team suspects all organisms have a brain computations that manage uncertainty.

“If you go to a grocery store, you’ll notice people standing in line will change between being stationary and moving around while waiting,” Cowan says. “We think that’s the same thing going on, that to maintain a stable balance you actually have to occasionally move around and excite your sensors like the knifefish. We found the statistical characteristics of those movements are ubiquitous across a wide range of animals, including humans.”

The team expects the findings can be used to improve search and rescue drones, space rovers, and other autonomous robots.

Next they will test whether their insights hold true for other living things—even plants.

Additional coauthors are from Johns Hopkins; the University of Minnesota Minneapolis; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Cornell University; and New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation supported the work.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

The global COVID-19 vaccination campaign saved 2.4 million lives in 141 countries and could have saved about 670,000 more had the vaccines been distributed equitably, say researchers.

The findings come from a working paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research prior to peer review.

The benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines are far-reaching by multiple measures, says coauthor Christopher M. Whaley, an associate professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University.

“Our study shows the enormous health impacts of COVID-19 vaccines, which in turn have huge economic benefits,” Whaley says. “In terms of lives saved and economic value, the COVID-19 vaccination campaign is likely the most impactful public health response in recent memory.”

The findings suggest that vaccination and therapeutics are much better at preventing death than other policies aimed at slowing the spread of the virus, the authors say.

“The global rollout of COVID vaccines was the largest public health campaign in human history,” says coauthor Neeraj Sood, a senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center and director of its COVID-19 Initiative. “By saving 2.46 million lives, the vaccines were much more effective than non-pharmaceutical interventions such as lockdowns and mask mandates.”

The researchers examined the real-world effectiveness of the global COVID-19 vaccination campaign on all-cause mortality, which accounts for both direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 vaccination efforts fully vaccinated more than 2 billion people within the first eight months after launching, and the team’s working paper is the first to estimate the effect the vaccines on excess deaths globally using observational data.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines “excess deaths” as the difference between observed and expected numbers of deaths over a specific time period. Excess deaths are a better measure than COVID-19 death data, the researchers note, which can be incorrectly reported.

While approximately 2.4 million deaths were averted from January to August 2021, researchers concluded that roughly 670,000 more lives could have been saved if vaccines were distributed in proportion to the populations of the 141 nations.

Because of the current market-based approach, high-income countries had more immediate access to vaccines than low and middle-income countries, the authors say.

The working paper also provides an economic analysis of the global vaccination campaign, with country-specific information, as well as comparisons with alternative distribution scenarios.

“Establishing a global vaccine distribution policy will be crucial in preparing for future pandemics,” says coauthor Virat Agrawal, a PhD candidate at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

The National Institute on Aging and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund supported the work.

Source: Brown University

A new study puts forward a new concept: a “general distractibility” trait, called “d” factor, that people prone to external and internal distractions share.

As you read this, you might be distracted by external stimulations like people talking near you or a smartphone notification. Or, perhaps it’s internal factors such as overthinking about an unpleasant memory or daydreaming.

The “d” factor had a strong correlation with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, suggesting heightened distractibility as a core ADHD deficit.

High “d” scores also relate to more “hyperfocus,” a prolonged state of intense focus. This suggests both hyperfocus and distractibility may involve challenges in attention regulation, says Han Zhang, a University of Michigan psychology doctoral student and the study’s lead author.

“Understanding individual differences in distractibility is important not only for predicting for whom attention is likely to fail, but also for understanding the cognitive underpinnings of psychopathology,” he says.

Previous studies have shown that people who report being distracted more easily are at a higher risk of poor performance in school and work settings. They are also sometimes prone to serious accidents.

Zhang and colleagues gathered data on 1,200 participants, ages 18 to 35, who completed more than a dozen questionnaires about being distracted in their daily lives. The questionnaires also evaluated symptoms of ADHD and hyperfocus.

The results indicated that the “d” factor predicted a person’s tendency to engage in external distraction, unwanted intrusive thoughts, and mind-wandering. It was also related to ADHD symptoms and functional impairments.

In addition, the findings indicated that individuals who were more distractible reported frequent hyperfocus episodes. Zhang says this counterintuitive relationship implies that focused and distracted attention might share some underlying features.

One possible interpretation is that individuals often hyperfocus on the same subjects that distract them from more critical tasks. For example, someone might hyperfocus on watching TV, which serves as a distraction from their work assignments, he says.

The study appears in PLOS ONE. Coauthors are from the University of Colorado and the University of Michigan.

Source: University of Michigan

A group of 200 species of closely related bats evolved wildly divergent jaws, a study shows.

They don’t know it, but Darwin’s finches changed the world. These closely related species—native to the Galapagos Islands—each sport a uniquely shaped beak that matches their preferred diet. Studying these birds helped Charles Darwin develop the theory of evolution by natural selection.

A group of bats has a similar—and more expansive—evolutionary story to tell. There are more than 200 species of noctilionoid bats, mostly in the American tropics. And despite being close relatives, their jaws evolved in wildly divergent shapes and sizes to exploit different food sources.

The paper in Nature Communications shows those adaptations include dramatic, but also consistent, modifications to tooth number, size, shape, and position. For example, bats with short snouts lack certain teeth, presumably due to a lack of space. Species with longer jaws have room for more teeth—and, like humans, their total tooth complement is closer to what the ancestor of placental mammals had.

According to the research team behind this study, comparing noctilionoid species can reveal a lot about how mammalian faces evolved and developed, particularly jaws and teeth. And as a bonus, they can also answer some outstanding questions about how our own pearly whites form and grow.

“Bats have all four types of teeth—incisors, canines, premolars, and molars—just like we do,” says coauthor Sharlene Santana, a University of Washington professor of biology and curator of mammals at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. “And noctilionoid bats evolved a huge diversity of diets in as little as 25 million years, which is a very short amount of time for these adaptations to occur.”

“There are noctilionoid species that have short faces like bulldogs with powerful jaws that can bite the tough exterior of the fruits that they eat. Other species have long snouts to help them drink nectar from flowers. How did this diversity evolve so quickly? What had to change in their jaws and teeth to make this possible?” says lead author Alexa Sadier, an incoming faculty member at the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier in France, who began this project as a postdoctoral researcher at the University California, Los Angeles.

Scientists don’t know what triggered this frenzy of dietary adaptation in noctilionoid bats. But today different noctilionoid species feast on insects, fruit, nectar, fish, and even blood—since this group also includes the infamous vampire bats.

The team used CT scans and other methods to analyze the shapes and sizes of jaws, premolars, and molars in more than 100 noctilionoid species. The bats included both museum specimens and a limited number of wild bats captured for study purposes. The researchers compared the relative sizes of teeth and other cranial features among species with different types of diets, and used mathematical modeling to determine how those differences are generated during development.

The team found that, in noctilionoid bats, certain “developmental rules” caused them to generate the right assortment of teeth to fit in their diet-formed grins. For example, bats with long jaws—like nectar-feeders—or intermediate jaws, like many insect-eaters, tended to have the usual complement of three premolars and three molars on each side of the jaw. But bats with short jaws, including most fruit-eating bats, tended to ditch the middle premolar or the back molar, if not both.

“When you have more space, you can have more teeth,” says Sadier. “But for bats with a shorter space, even though they have a more powerful bite, you simply run out of room for all these teeth.”

Having a shorter jaw may also explain why many short-faced bats also tended to have wider front molars.

“The first teeth to appear tend to grow bigger since there is not enough space for the next ones to emerge,” says Sadier.

“This project is giving us the opportunity to actually test some of the assumptions that have been made about how tooth growth, shape and size are regulated in mammals,” says Santana. “We know surprisingly little about how these very important structures develop!”

Many studies about mammalian tooth development were done in mice, which have only molars and heavily modified incisors. Scientists are not entirely sure if the genes and developmental patterns that control tooth development in mice also operate in mammals with more “ancestral” sets of chompers—like bats and humans.

The hairy-legged vampire bat, Diphylla ecaudata, feeds primarily on the blood of birds. It is one of three living species of vampire bats—all of them noctilionoid, and all with sharply reduced numbers of teeth and short jaws, likely due to their specialized diet.

Sadier, Santana, and their colleagues believe their project, which is ongoing, can start to answer these questions in bats—along with many other outstanding questions about how evolution shapes mammalian features. They’re expanding this study to include noctilionoid incisors and canines, and hope to uncover more of the genetic and developmental mechanisms that control tooth development in this diverse group of bats.

“We see such strong selective pressures in these bats: Shapes have to closely match their function,” says Santana. “I think there are many more evolutionary secrets hidden in these species.”

Coauthors are from King’s College London; Durham University in the UK; Green Shield Technology; Dresden University of Technology in Germany; and UCLA. The research has funding from the National Science Foundation.

Source: University of Washington

The number of heat-related cardiovascular deaths in the United States will increase over the next four decades, according to a new analysis.

Extreme heat can affect heart health in many ways, including increased heart rate, changes in blood pressure, and increased inflammation. Left untreated, these issues can be deadly.

The findings, published in Circulation, indicate that older adults and Black adults will experience greater increases in excess cardiovascular deaths due to extreme heat.

“As global temperatures rise, analyzing how demographic and environmental trends are connected is necessary for accurate forecasts of how extreme heat events will impact the cardiovascular health of US adults in the coming decades,” says senior author Sameed Khatana, an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

According to the analysis, the number of cardiovascular deaths associated with extreme heat among adults living in the United States is projected to have a statistically significant increase from the current period (2008-2019) to the mid-century period (2036-2065).

To reach this conclusion, researchers evaluated the number of cardiovascular deaths that were associated with extreme heat from 2008-2019. In that time period, there were an average of 54 days each summer when the heat index rose to or above 90 degrees and a total of 1,651 related cardiovascular deaths annually.

Researchers then combined this estimate with the projected number of extreme heat days, as well as population levels in the middle of the century. As a result of more regularly recurring hot temperatures and demographic changes, they project between 4,320 to 5,491 deaths annually come the middle of the 21st century.

Furthermore, the researchers analyzed this impact on subgroups of populations, including older adults and Black adults and found that Black adults may experience even greater increases of cardiovascular related deaths due to heat exposure, with a more than 500% increase in the coming decade compared to current deaths from cardiovascular related complications.

This could be due to the increased risks Black adults have for cardiovascular disease, which can be tied to factors such as social determinants of health (like neighborhood poverty level) and clinical factors (such as blood pressure).

Additionally, previous studies have shown that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of non-white residents have lower air conditioning access and less tree canopy cover which increases heat exposure to the residents of these neighborhoods.

“This is a health equity issue and without steps to mitigate its impacts, extreme heat may widen the pre-existing cardiovascular health disparities that already exist between communities in the United States,” Khatana says.

Additionally, people with underlying conditions such as diabetes and heart disease are at a greater risk when temperatures rise. Irregular heartbeat, heart attack, or stroke can occur as the body tries to cool itself down.

The authors recommend infrastructure investment in high-risk communities to help mitigate the effects of climate change. For example, increasing tree canopy cover and developing heat action plans—which ensure vulnerable populations have ways to cool down during instances of increasing temperatures—are all ways to help lower the number of cardiovascular deaths related to extreme heat.

The American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute funded the work.

Source: Penn

Nostalgia is popular among NFL social media users, a study shows. The results could help increase social media engagement for regular business owners, as well.

Wenche Wang, assistant professor of sport management at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology, examined 64,778 NFL Instagram posts and divided social media users on the site into two groups: NFL fans and general social media users. She found that posts that induced nostalgia were more likely to engage general social media users. Loyal fans, on the other hand, were more likely to engage with informational posts, she says.

This is important because customer engagement is the holy grail of social media strategy for any business because it increases brand awareness, company loyalty, and revenue, she says.

There are parallels between other businesses and the NFL franchises that Wang looked at, she says. Most businesses have “fans”––customers who will go to the company’s social media page because they already like the product. Then there are the users who stumble upon the company’s site while using social media.

“You always receive some attention from your own fans and then some who are just looking around and see the post,” Wang says.

This is the low-hanging fruit likely to engage with nostalgic posts. NFL teams posted special features like Throwback Thursday or Flashback Friday, featuring tidbits about the history of the city or team or player, or even general historical events unrelated to the team. Other businesses can do the same, she says.

Both types of social media users paid attention to informational posts on NFL’s Instagram, but fans were much more engaged with informational posts compared to general social media users.

“The fans used informational posts for real-time discussions about the game, so when a game is going on, they were using it as another platform to discuss the game together,” Wang says.

The NFL teams didn’t seem to be aware of how well the nostalgic posts were engaging users, Wang says. The posts they posted most often were garnering the least engagement.

For instance, about 6% of posts were holiday greetings or gratitude-type posts, which are used to build relationships. About 19% of posts encouraged people to take a quiz or react or comment. None of these was effective in engaging users, Wang says.

“So simply asking people to engage, or conveying care with text or basic photos or video content, did not seem to be very effective in engaging social media users,” she says. “The ones I did find to be very effective in engaging users were the nostalgic posts, and that was only 1.7% of the sample.”

Wang says it might be tough for the NFL to track posts effectively because of volume.

“When you’re posting so much, you might not be able to systematically track which posts are most effective,” she says.

The study appears in the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship.

Source: University of Michigan

The last week in October is Bat Week, so experts are separating fact from fiction about the amazing and beneficial animals.

As the only true flying mammal—flying squirrels glide, not fly—bats can seem a little bizarre, which probably doesn’t help their public perception. They live in dark places, come out at night to feed, and the sight of hundreds in flight can send a shiver down people’s spines.

The bumblebee bat can weigh less than a penny. The flying fox/fruit bat can have a wingspan over four feet.

But bats are far more friend than foe. Although, like all wildlife, they need space and a healthy dose of respect, they deserve our appreciation rather than our abhorrence.

Brian Pierce, associate director of the Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute at Bryan-College Station, and Janet Hurley, AgriLife Extension senior program specialist for school integrated pest management in Dallas, share their insights below.

Pierce is part of a team looking at ways to stop the spread and protect bats from white-nose syndrome, a fungal infection that affects and kills hibernating bats. It does not cause illness in humans but is transferred between bat populations with devastating results.

Bat benefits

Ranging from Instagram-cute to a face only a mother, or biologist, could love—all bats play key roles in their ecosystems and are crucially important to biodiversity, human health, and agriculture.

Hate mosquitoes? Bats have your back. They can eat up to their weight in insects each night. Their insect-heavy diet also serves to protect crops from pests.

“Bats provide such a vital role in controlling insect pests, but because most people never interact with them, they don’t really appreciate how important they are for public health and agriculture,” Pierce explains.

Pierce says that although bats don’t rid us of all our insect pests, they put a huge dent in their populations.

“Back when southern states were fighting yellow fever and other insect-transmitted diseases, giant artificial roosts were constructed for bats,” he says. “Bats were used to minimize mosquitoes and control disease spread before the use of pesticides.”

Bats also act as pollinators for over 300 fruits and spread seeds for nuts, figs, and cacao. If you love chocolate or guacamole, the work they do as pollinators helps make all those products possible. And, they serve as a food source for birds of prey as well as some other animals.

“All species have an important role to play in our environment,” says Pierce. “It just so happens that bats play a role we don’t really see. It is very much like the bee population; without bees many things wouldn’t be pollinated and the effect on agriculture would be huge.”

Don’t buy these bat myths

• Bats are not blind. They have good vision but also use sound waves, or echolocation, to help them navigate and locate food.
• Not all bats live in huge colonies in caves. Some species are loners and prefer to have a small space of their own.
• Unlike the myth of Dracula, bats don’t live forever and aren’t afraid of the sunlight.
• Some species can live up to 30 years and not all bats are strictly nocturnal.
• Only a few species of bats actually drink blood and their usual choice of host is cattle or chickens, and they don’t drink enough to kill the animal. The rest stick to a diet of insects, small reptiles, fruits, and pollen.
• Bats will not fly at you to attack your head. If one seems to dive-bomb you, they are probably swooping down to get the mosquitoes and insects you attract.

Fascinating bat facts

• Bracken Cave Preserve, located outside of San Antonio, has the world’s largest colony, with an estimated 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats. Most females can only have one baby, or pup, per year. Times of drought, food scarcity, and stress can result in entire colonies not producing pups.
• Their size varies from teeny tiny to several pounds. The bumblebee bat can weigh less than a penny whereas the flying fox/fruit bat can have a wingspan over four feet.
• Each species has a unique vocalization.
• Bats within the genus Myotis have been found to have telomeres that don’t seem to shorten with age. Telomeres, which are sections of DNA located at the end of chromosomes, affect the aging process for all mammals. This could explain why they are the longest-living known bat species and could help scientists better understand the process of aging.
• Some bats hibernate during the winter while others migrate to warmer climates.
• Scientists who study bats are called chiropterologists.

How can we protect bats?

As people encroach on what has historically been their habitat, bat populations can be negatively affected through habitat loss. This also can lead to more human/bat interactions.

Part of protecting bats is making sure they don’t encounter people and that they don’t make their homes in places where removal will be necessary. Hurley teaches professionals how to keep bats out of schools and other buildings and what to do should they come in contact with one.

“They traditionally return to the same place to roost again and again,” Hurley says. “So, if that grove of trees is cut down and replaced with a building or house, there’s a good chance that bats will try to make themselves at home if they can find a way to enter the building.”

What about rabies?

For centuries people have been fearful of getting rabies from bats. Nowadays, if a person does come in contact, post-exposure prophylaxis is available. This series of shots can prevent rabies from developing if given before symptoms start.

It is a good precautionary practice to seek medical evaluation and care immediately following any direct contact with a bat, Hurley says.

Most years, the United States records zero deaths from rabies from bats, but there were five fatal instances in 2021 involving people who didn’t seek medical aid and/or weren’t properly treated in time.

“Your odds of dying from getting rabies from a bat are very slight, but proper caution around them is something children and adults need to be aware of and understand,” Hurley says.

The reality is you need to take extra caution and avoid any bat or other wildlife that is acting strangely. Never touch or hold any bat.

Like all wildlife, keep your distance and don’t enter caves or other places where they live and mate. Bats have far more to fear from us than the other way around.

Source: Texas A&M University

Sunscreen usage is climbing, but so are melanoma and skin cancer rates. Researchers call it the “sunscreen paradox.”

“The problem is that people use sunscreen as a ‘permission slip’ to tan,” says Ivan Litvinov, an associate professor in the department of medicine and chair of the dermatology division at McGill University and coauthor of two recent studies that explore the sunscreen paradox.

“People think they are protected from skin cancer because they are using a product marketed to prevent a condition.”

Most people don’t apply enough sunscreen or stay in the sun for hours after applying sunscreen in the morning. “This gives them a false sense of security,” Litvinov says.

To understand the factors between varying incidence rates of melanoma in the Atlantic provinces of Canada, researchers including Litvinov and colleague Sandra Peláez conducted 23 focus groups.

In the first study, published in the journal Cancers, the researchers found that Canadians living in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island—provinces with high melanoma incidence rates—were more likely to report using sun protection, more aware of the health risks of sun exposure, and more apt to follow the UV index.

Despite this, they also received more sun exposure due to warmer temperatures and a tendency to engage in outdoor activities.

Similarly, in a second study of the United Kingdom Biobank by Jeremian, Xie, and Litvinov, the researchers documented that sunscreen use was surprisingly associated with a more than twofold risk of developing skin cancer. This study appears in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention.

“These combined findings suggest a sunscreen paradox, whereby individuals with higher levels of sun exposure also tend to use more but not an adequate quantity of sunscreen or other sun-protection measures, providing a false sense of security,” Litvinov says.

Interventions to address knowledge and practice gaps in sun protection and skin cancer prevention must consider this sunscreen paradox and the unique norms of communities around the world, he says.

“Sunscreen is important, but it is also the least effective way to protect your skin when compared to sun protective clothing, rash guards, and sun avoidance. People can and should enjoy the outdoors, but without getting a sunburn or a suntan,” says Litvinov.

Source: McGill University

A new smartphone case could soon help people with visual impairments, tremors, and spasms use touchscreens independently.

The case, dubbed BrushLens, could let users perceive, locate, and tap buttons and keys on the touchscreen menus now ubiquitous in restaurant kiosks, ATM machines, and other public terminals.

“So many technologies around us require some assumptions about users’ abilities, but seemingly intuitive interactions can actually be challenging for people,” says study first author Chen Liang, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan.

“People have to be able to operate these inaccessible touchscreens in the world. Our goal is to make that technology accessible to everyone,” Liang says.

Liang works in the lab of Anhong Guo, assistant professor of computer science and engineering. Guo led the development of BrushLens with Alanson Sample, an associate professor in the same department.

Users can comb through a touchscreen interface by holding a phone connected to BrushLens against a touchscreen and dragging the phone across the screen. The phone sees what’s on the screen with its camera then reads the options aloud by harnessing the phone’s built-in screen readers. Users indicate their menu choice through screen readers or an enlarged, easy-to-tap button in the BrushLens app.

“I could actually see myself accomplishing something that I otherwise thought impossible.”

When given a target, BrushLens divides the screen into a grid, then guides the user’s hand toward the section of the screen containing their menu choice by saying the coordinates of both the target and device. Once those coordinates overlap, pushbuttons or autoclickers on the underside of the phone case tap the screen for the user, depending on the model.

“The user doesn’t have to precisely locate where the button is and perform the touch gesture,” Liang says.

Ten study participants, six with visual impairments and four with tremors or spasms, tested the hardware and app.

“As a blind person, touchscreens are pretty much inaccessible to me unless I have some help or I can plug headphones into the kiosk,” says study participant Sam Rau. “Somebody else has to order for you, or they have to help you out with it. I don’t want to be in a situation where I always have to rely on the kindness of others.”

It took some time for Rau to figure BrushLens out, but once he became familiar with the device, he was excited by the tool’s potential.

“I thought about myself going into a Panera Bread and being able to order from the kiosk,” Rau says. “I could actually see myself accomplishing something that I otherwise thought impossible.”

Likewise, BrushLens worked as intended for users whose tremors or spasms cause them to make unwanted selections on touchscreens. For one participant with cerebral palsy, BrushLens improved their accuracy by nearly 74%.

The inventors of BrushLens recently applied for a patent with the help of Innovation Partnerships, the University of Michigan’s -M’s central hub for research commercialization. The team hopes to bring the product to users as an affordable phone accessory.

“The parts that we used are relatively affordable. Each clicker costs only $1,” Liang says. “The whole device is definitely under $50, and that’s a conservative estimate.”

The team plans to further streamline their design so that it easily fits in a pocket. Offloading the battery and processing to the phone, for example, could make the design cheaper and less bulky.

“It doesn’t have to be much more complex than a TV remote,” says coauthor Yasha Iravantchi, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering.

The companion app could also be improved by allowing users to directly interface with it via voice commands, Liang says.

Participants were enrolled in the trial study with the help of the Disability Network, the University of Michigan Council for Disability Concerns, and the James Weiland research group in the UM biomedical engineering department. A Google Research Scholar Award funded the work.

Liang will demo BrushLens at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in San Francisco.

Source: Derek Smith for University of Michigan