TCNL History

TCNL's present mission stems from a line of research aimed at maximizing the brain's capacity to recover function impaired by damage or loss of sensory information. This section provides a brief, selective, timeline of this research.

• Paul Bach-y-Rita receives his MD degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1959 and practices medicine in Tilzapotla, Morelos, a rural village in Mexico.
• Paul and his brother George craft an aggressive and innovative post-acute recovery program for their father Pedro, who had a massive stroke. After Pedro's full recovery Paul reasons that the brain must somehow be capaple of reorganizing its function long after injury when given the right "tools" for rehablitation. This initiates his theory of "late brain plasticity."
• Paul and colleagues develop and demonstrate a tactile vision substituion system (TVSS) at the Smith-Kettlewell Institue of Visual Sciences in San Francisco, earning them an article in Nature (vol. 221, no. 5184, pp 963-964).
• Paul publishes his seminal book Brain Mechanisms in Sensory Substitution (New York: Academic Press, 1972), which compares the brain's ability to interpret visual information using the sense of touch with its ability to recover function after damage due to injury or disease.
• Paul moves his research program to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983, becoming Chair of Rehabilitation Medicine.
• Kurt Kaczmarek, as a graduate student, collaborates with Paul on tactile vision research 1984-1985.
• Paul, Kurt, and Mitchell (Mitch) Tyler collaborate on fingertip electrotactile (electrical stimulation of touch) display of computer graphics in what became known in 1992 as the Tactile Display Lab.
• Paul and Kurt demonstrate in 1997 that the tongue is as capable as the fingertip for perception of electrotactile geometric patterns. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) files a US Patent application; the patent is granted in 2002 as patent 6,430,450.
• Paul and Mitch co-found Wicab, Inc. in 1998 to commercialize tongue tactile display technology.
• Kurt develops the Tongue Display Unit (TDU) in 1998-9 for further research on tongue tactile display.
• Kurt, Mitch, and Paul develop the vision substitution application for the TDU in 1999. The system is featured in a CBC film Touch: The Forgotten Sense. It is now being commercialized as the BrainPort™ Vision System by Wicab, Inc., and is in FDA clinical trials.
• Mitch, Yuri Danilov,, and Paul demonstrate in 2001 that vestibular sensory substitution, i.e. presentation of head tilt information on the tongue, improves balance and gait in persons with vestibular disorders. The improvement persists for hours after use of the device is stopped.
• Yuri begins developing the neurophysiological framework to explain tongue-stimulation-enhanced long-term functional recovery in subjects with vestibular disorders. This theory, when more fully developed, came to be called Cranial-Nerve Non-Invasive Neuromodulation (CN-NINM).
• Paul dies in 2006; Yuri, Kurt, and Mitch become lab co-directors.
• The Tactile Display Lab is renamed the Tactile Communication & Neurorehabilitation Lab in 2008, reflecting the expanded role of neurorehabilitation research.
• Yuri, Mitch, and Kurt demonstrate in 2008 that whole-tongue electrotactile stimulation, with no head tilt information, dramatically improves the effectiveness of therapy exercises to improve balance and gait in persons with a variety of neurological disorders, supporting CN-NINM theory.
• Kurt develops the first "version 0" Portable Neuromodulation Stimulator (PoNS™) in 2008.
• The TCNL co-directors found Advanced NeuroRehabilitation LLC in 2009 to commercialize CN-NINM technology.
• Kurt and Mitch develop PoNS versions 1 and 2 in 2009 and 2010. Approximately 100 PoNS devices are tested on human subject volunteers under approved IRB protocol.
• MD/PhD student Joe Wildenberg, the TCNL co-directors, and UW Biomedical Engineering Department Chair Beth Meyerand collaboratively publish three journal articles 2010-2011. Results from fMRI studies show that CN-NIMN therapy causes sustained activity changes in brain regions responsible for movement control.

Updated 10/28/2011