THE HISTORY OF TACTILING In June, 1945, I was on my first trip outside Sweden after the war. I was eight years old and lived with my parents in a suburb of Stockholm. I had just finished the spring school term and was visiting my sister in Denmark. Suddenly I got very ill and was sent to a hospital, where they found I had contracted meningitis. While spending several weeks in hospital recovering, it became apparent that I had lost my hearing. At first I had some balance problems too, but these rapidly went away. But my deafness stayed and although my parents took me to a Swedish clinic for observation and hearing tests, there was nothing to test. I had become and, would remain, completely deaf. My parents were told I should attend a special school for deaf children where I could learn to Sign. And that was that. But then my parents met a man named Erik Wedenberg, a Professor of Audiology, who was at that time developing a new kind of oral training for deaf children. He encouraged my parents to speak loudly and clearly into my ears to stimulate whatever residual hearing I might have. What I remember is that there were other cues from his method, such as feeling the breath stream, and on occasions this plus some lipreading helped. In the end Erik Wedenberg became a close friend and advisor to my parents, and for me the most important thing he did was to get my parents directly involved with my rehabilitation. My father and mother started daily training sessions in which they spent hours reading to me from books with their mouths up close to my ear speaking as loudly and clearly as possible. For my part, I did not perform as expected because I was irritated by the physical closeness and I placed my hand rather firmly against their necks to push them away. When I pushed them away, I would watch their faces as they read and I think this led me to make a connection between what I was feeling tactually with my hand against their necks and what I was seeing about how their mouths and faces moved. In any event, although this method was not what was planned, we made rapid progress in my rehabilitation. I experimented with different hand positions and eventually found one that seemed to be the best. I found that placing my hand on the shoulder with my thumb loosely against the side of the neck was most comfortable and gave the most information. This training period only lasted about a month. After that I always placed my hand on the neck of someone I was talking to. I performed so well that at the end of that summer I returned to my regular school. From that time on I performed as a hard-of-hearing person, not a deaf one. I finished my secondary school training and later attended a university where I received my degrees in chemistry. In those days there were no assistive services available for deaf university students, but with help from my fellow students I was able to get by. I have received no additional rehabilitative training, have studied and learned to speak and write in several foreign languages although I have never heard them spoken. I don't wish to give the impression that my life has been without problems. There have been some of course, but I can't recall ever experiencing any social ones having to do with my method of communication. It has always been accepted. I have a normal family life and have been employed in the same molecular biology group for the last 30 years. For the last ten years, I have worked with an audiological clinic trying to develop aids and methods that will help other deaf individuals use the tactile method. More about this later; I will first recall how I use the natural, unaided "tactiling". The way I use tactiling with strangers, or what I think of as my "tactile tactics", depends on the situation. Sometimes I just read lips if it is an easy situation like buying a newspaper. If I need better understanding, I use my "pickpocket tactic". I casually place my hand on a stranger's shoulder and tell them to please repeat what they said because I don't hear so well. Sometimes I tell them it helps me to understand if I place my hand on their shoulder. That usually works. One thing that people find unusual is that I have rarely received any negative response to my methods. Just the opposite is the usual case. People will say things like, "It's so interesting and practical". "Do other deaf people use the same method as you?" The key seems to be that the stranger should first experience the difficulty of communicating with a deaf person and then be offered a way to make it so much easier. When I'm in an unfamiliar group of people, or in an unfamiliar situation, I always let people know from the beginning that I'm deaf and I try to locate the individual in the group who knows about the group, or the topic, or the milieu in which we are operating. This person then usually becomes my "interlocutor". Part of being a successful deaf person, it seems to me, is to learn to pick the right "interlocutor" for the specific situation. This affective aspect is an important part of the success of tactiling. Also, tactiling is a very positive reminder to people in the group that you are deaf. EVOLUTION OF TACTILATOR In the early 1980's I had the opportunity to try out some newly developed tactile aids. I had often thought about using my combined practical experience as a deaf person using the tactiling method along with my knowledge of electronics and physics to develop some kind of tactile device. The devices I saw represented a number of different approaches and while some of them (one in particular, the "Sentiphone" by Hartmut Traunmuller) were pretty good, they all had some shortcomings. I found I could perform better with my own methods than with these devices. Not long after this I experienced a much neater and smaller device at the Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. This device called the "Minivib" was developed by Dr. Karl-Eric Spens. Again, while I thought this device was very nice, I felt it supplied less information to me than direct tactiling and later studies by Karl-Eric and Geoff Plant of The Australian National Acoustics Laboratory showed my suspicions were correct. In spite of its limitations I found the Minivib to be useful on some occasions, so I started carrying one around. Also, the continued interest at the Royal Institute by Karl-Eric and Dr. Arne Risberg encouraged me to continue my work in seeking some way of building a tactile device that worked really well for me. Let me interrupt this story just for a moment and tell you about my situation at the time I am writing about. Until 1984 I had almost no contact with other hearing-impaired people. I wasn't totally aware that a hearing loss could be so disabling. I thought if you had established language skills it really wasn't much of a problem. I was only vaguely aware that tactiling was unknown to the vast majority of deaf people. I was far more involved with the trivial every day problems that concern us all; my family, my career and my social life. At about this time a campaign was started in Sweden to identify the adult deaf community and I was interested in this and from that time on I became involved and interested in finding out more about a suitable tactile aid. I was convinced that a good tactile aid would be very useful to many deaf people, not just myself. In that same year (1984) I attended a meeting of the International Federation of the Hard of Hearing and presented a paper on my thoughts on Tactiling and tactile aids. I was hoping that at this meeting I would meet other Tactilers, because I knew how successful the approach had been for me. Unfortunately this didn't happen. There are very few deaf individuals who use tactiling in their daily lives. I have met or heard of only three other deaf persons after having sought for nearly twenty years. In spite of this lack of use or knowledge about tactile aids and tactiling, I started to make some progress. In 1985 Geoff Plant from Australia (visiting at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm) and Karl-Eric Spens of that same institute invited me to participate in studying 2 different tactile aids and comparing them to tactiling. After that work a number of people from the field of cognitive psychology became interested in the subject, and Gunilla Ohngren, who lives in my home-town of Uppsala, started her Doctoral Thesis on Lipreading supplemented by Tactiling. Together Gunilla and I started looking at different methods for building a tactile device directed to Tactiling and at this time Gunilla invented the name "Tactilator". Concerning the development of the device, I originally discussed the principles with engineers from the Royal Institute and they built a laboratory prototype, which worked well. Then I received a grant to develop it further in Uppsala and got help from the audiological department and the hearing aid engineer, Jan Nordstrand. We succeeded in constructing a small wearable device. Gunilla used this device in her thesis work and showed that all subjects improved their lipreading rates from 10% to 50% when using this device. And this was with no previous experience or training. This was a very exciting result indeed! In 1990 there was a meeting of the tactile aid community in Sidney, Australia, which I attended. This first meeting of the International Tactile Aid Conference was organized and run by Geoff Plant of The National Acoustics Laboratory who I have mentioned previously. Also at this meeting I met David Franklin, President of Audiological Engineering Corporation of the United States, for the first time. Two years later, at the second meeting of this conference, this time held in Stockholm, David, Geoff, and I came up with the idea of trying to get a Grant from The National Institutes of Health(NIH) in the United States to fund the development of a commercial version of a Tactilator. David wrote the Grant, Geoff relocated to Audiological Engineering, and NIH provided the money. It took a long while, but we finally did it and the new device from Audiological Engineering called the "Tactilator" is the result of our work. If you wish to email Gustaf, he can be reached at Gustaf