Hearing through the Skin
What we’re doing right now is we’re building a vest for people who are deaf and there's a microphone on the vest and it picks up sounds and it turns it into vibrations on the body. So it’s little vibratory motors like you find in your cell phone and what's happening is we’re doing digital signal processing on the auditory stream and we’re feeding this into somebody’s body and they will come to be able to hear through their skin.
Now, this sounds crazy, but remember that hearing anyway is just air compression waves getting turned into electrical signals that go into the brain. So what we’re doing is we’re just feeding that through an atypical sensory channel, it gets turned into electrical signals in the brain.