Tongue Twister: When A Diving Accident Left a GE Engineer Quadriplegic, He Turned to Bionics for Help. Now He Is Driving His Wheelchair with the Flick of His Tongue

Four years ago, Jason Disanto’s life took a skid. For a dozen years, Disanto, who is 38-years old and has an easy smile, had been a globe-trotting GE engineer bringing electricity to people in West Africa, China, and South America. “Basically, there would be a green field,” he says. “We would go in and leave behind a power plant.” Then in April 2009, at home in Atlanta, he dove into his backyard pool and rammed his head against the concrete bottom.

The accident left Disanto paralyzed from the neck down. But it failed to subdue his spirit and the curiosity and engineering drive that animated his life and career.



Disanto spent the next four months in the hospital, first in the trauma center and then at Atlanta’s Shepherd Center, a renowned specialty hospital for people with severe spine and brain injuries. He soon made new friends. A group of graduate students and engineers from the Bionics Lab at the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology were at Shepherd testing high-tech gear designed to makes simple tasks, like turning a wheelchair or moving a computer cursor, easier for quadriplegics.

One such device was the tongue drive system. The technology tracks the position of a magnetic stud attached to the tongue and allows users to steer their wheelchairs by its movements. Disanto was intrigued.

One member of the team was Xueliang Huo, a graduate student from Ningbo, a Chinese seaport where Disanto built a power plant. They hit it off. Disanto started working with the team, using the tongue drive to navigate an obstacle course and control a computer. “We had a lot of sessions on functionality and the esthetics we needed to develop,” Disanto says. “For them, it’s a little bit difficult to understand the little nuances and the little ins-and-outs that somebody like me can provide.” For example, he helped the team to improve the steering. “They had it very jagged and jerky,” he says. “When you move faster the drive is actually more smooth.”

An early version of the tongue drive system tracked the magnetic stud with two plastic “booms” running down Disanto’s jawbones, like a couple of hands-free headsets. “When I moved my tongue to the top right-hand corner of my mouth, that would be a stop command,” he says. “If I go to the top left-hand corner of my mouth, that would make my wheelchair go forward. For the lower teeth, I can set up the left and right movement of the chair.”

The booms were a good first step. “One of the problems we encountered with the earliest headset was that it could shift on a user’s head and the system would need to be recalibrated,” says Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo, founder of the Bionics Lab. Disanto helped Ghovanloo test a new system with sensors fitted tightly inside a dental retainer.

The system links the retainer wirelessly via a Bluetooth with an iPhone running special software that interprets the tongue stud signals. Disanto can use the tongue drive to operate a computer, make calls, or flip a TV channel. “It’s an independence tool,” he says. “It’s also a little fashionable, I guess,” he says about his tongue stud. “I try to keep it discrete for business reasons.”

Disanto has business in mind because he is back at work as product service engineer. GE has set him up with a modified desk, voice activated software, a head mouse to operate the computer, and flexible hours. He goes to work with his personal assistant. “There are a lot of things I did before that I don't do too much of these days, such as car racing,” he says. “I used to travel a lot, and I'm slowly getting back into that.”


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Jason Disanto with Georgia Tech's Hung Yoo Park, Xueliang Huo, and Dr. Ghovanloo, mom Victoria Disanto, and GE colleagues Sherwyn Applewhaite and Abdul Wahab Memon (from left to right).
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Jason Disanto with his family. His brother-in-law George Cowles III, sister Ginalyn Cowles, nephew George Cowles IV, father Joseph Disanto, and mom Victoria Disanto.
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The circuitry for the new intraoral Tongue Drive System developed at Georgia Tech is embedded in this dental retainer worn in the mouth (right). The system interprets commands from seven different tongue movements to operate a computer (left) or maneuver an electrically powered wheelchair. Image credit: Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo
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The dental appliance for the new intraoral tongue drive system contains magnetic field sensors mounted on its four corners that detect movement of a tiny magnet attached to the tongue. It also includes a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and an induction coil to charge the battery. Image credit: Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo
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Georgia Tech researchers designed this universal interface for the intraoral Tongue Drive System that attaches directly to a standard electric wheelchair. The interface boasts multiple functions: it not only holds the iPod, but also wirelessly receives the sensor data and delivers it to the iPod, connects the iPod to the wheelchair, charges the iPod, and includes a container where the dental retainer can be placed at night for charging. Image credit: Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo
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Cheese Lights the Whey: Biogas from Dairy Farm, Brewery and Landfill Turns Wisconsin Hospital into Renewables Powerhouse

The Crave Brothers dairy farm in Waterloo, Wisconsin, makes tubs of celebrated mascarpone cheese. Across the state, City Brewery in La Crosse brews millions of cases of winning ales and lagers. But Wisconsin’s Gundersen Lutheran Hospital gets excited about the stuff that doesn’t pass the smell test.

Gundersen takes biogas produced from cheese whey and brewing waste, as well as landfill methane, and turns it into megawatts of electricity in GE’s Jenbacher engines. The pioneering hospital has been investing in renewable electricity and conservation and has set a goal to become 100 percent energy independent by 2014.

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Pretty on the Inside: Intermediate flanch from GE's Jenbacher engine. There are over 1,300 GE Jenbacher gas engines running on biogas installed around the world. They generate more than 6.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity per year.
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Pretty on the Inside: Jenbacher engine block.
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Pretty on the Inside: Jenbacher gas mixer cones.
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Pretty on the Inside: Jenbacher crankshaft.
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Drill, Baby, Drill: GE machinist is using a high-precision CNC drilling machine to manufacture a crankshaft for the Jenbacher engine.
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This helps the environment - the landfill and the brewery used to flare off the gas - and it’s also good for business. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates American hospitals spend $5 billion, or at least 15 percent of their profits, on energy costs. Hospital pavilions are also more than 2.5 times more energy and CO2 intensive than office buildings. “Our goal is to show that we can be environmentally sound and improve our finances at the same time,” Jeff Thompson, Gundersen’s CEO told Fast Company recently.

The hospital’s Jenbachers, which are part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio, started generating renewable power and heat at the dairy farm and the brewery in 2009. Last week, Gundersen’s 350,000 square-foot clinic in Onalaska became possibly the nation’s first energy-independent medical campus. The clinic gets all the power it needs from yet another Jenbacher burning methane produced by the La Crosse County landfill. For GE, the Onalaska story gets even better. The landfill Jenbacher powers two GE digital mammography screening units that the clinic installed last year.

Electricity from biogas and wind now covers about 30 percent of Gundersen’s total power demand. The La Crosse landfill project alone will produce more than $7 million in revenue over the next decade, the hospital estimates. Those are real savings which Gundersen can pass to patients. “The landfill requires initial investment, but in six-and-a-haIf years it will be completely paid for, and we’ll have several hundred thousand dollars less each year in energy costs,” CEO Thompson told Fast Company. “If the cost of energy skyrockets, it won’t hurt our patients and our community.”

Good Vibrations: Turbine Doctors Take Pulse of Global Wind Farms

Doctors know the power of data in making a good diagnosis. Each patient seems unique, but treat many and patterns will emerge. What works for humans is true for technology, too. Take wind turbines. Weather battered and wind blasted, they are easy to run but much harder to fix. But what if you could tell from the comfort of an office before things go awry? Engineers at GE Energy decided to find out. “We were looking for clues that a turbine is sick,” says John Mihok, advanced monitoring and diagnostics engineer at GE Energy.

The Doctor Will See You Now: New GE system uses data from 12,000 turbines to spot trouble before it happens.

Mihok’s quest started in 2009, after a blade shifted at a U.S. wind farm. “During the investigation we analyzed the data for what might have caused it,” Mihok says. “We realized that there was a very clear data signature for what the issue was.”

The team then searched and sifted a pool of turbine data. They looked for patterns, first in Excel spreadsheets and then in an online database. “We found other turbines with the exact same data signature for the exact same problem,” Mihok says. “We took them off-line, did a quick repair, and got them back going again.”

The engineers then widened their net. They built proprietary software and algorithms to spot odd vibrations, hot bearings, low power production and other anomalies. “We mine the data for features that let us know that there is a sick turbine out there,” Mihok says. GE knows the game. For many years it’s been remotely monitoring jet engines, helicopters, locomotives, and rotating oil and gas equipment.

Sensors inside each turbine perform an automatic check-up every 10 minutes. They send the information to a central database, which holds gigabytes of data from 12,000 turbines around the world. Some 150 unique rules and algorithms then analyze it and the system automatically sends out an alert when an anomaly is detected. The alert includes specific information about the problem, what needs to be corrected, and how soon to react. It travels to a field technician who will fix it to avoid failure.

GE has built more than half the wind turbines in the U.S. The company estimates that the system that the GE Energy team developed, called PulsePOINT, has saved over $30 million in avoided repairs, lost production, and maintenance costs.

Move Over Indiana Jones – GE Cameras Do Non-Invasive Tomb Exploration

Archaeologists exploring a newly discovered first-century tomb in Jerusalem have brought to bear some twenty-first century Remote Visual Inspection (RVI) equipment from GE. The Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras and VideoProbes enabled the crew from the University of North Carolina to unlock the secrets of the tomb without entering the chamber. What they discovered there will be revealed in a new documentary film and an accompanying book which launches today at the Discovery Times Square Museum in New York.

License to study this historically significant tomb in the East Talpiot section of Jerusalem was granted to the academic team under stipulation by religious groups and the Israel Antiquities Authority that nobody should enter the tomb, nor should anything be disturbed or retrieved.

Secrets of the tomb: A view of the inside of the 2,000-year-old tomb on the screen of the XLG3.

After drilling three eight-inch holes through two meters of rock, the team deployed a GE CA-Zoom PTZ camera attached to a mechanical/pneumatic arm designed by Hollywood prop maker, Walter Klassen. The crew also employed GE’s XLG3 video probe, which was able to snake its way through the ancient masonry and capture images from even more remote corners of the tomb.

Ultra sharp images were required to make the inscriptions on the ossuaries legible to viewers, so engineers from the Inspection Technologies business of GE Measurement & Control custom designed a high definition camera for the crew.

The project was launched and funded by Toronto based Associated Producers, with Discovery Channel backing. Titled “The Resurrection Tomb,” the documentary will air this spring in the U.S. on The Discovery Channel.

Shedding light on the past: The PTZ camera inside the tomb, illuminated by the XLG3 video probe.

GE’s RVI technology was developed for industrial applications such as inspection of jet engines for overhaul and repair. It is used to check for corrosion and cracks in machinery, to peer inside tanks and containers, down pipes, and through all sorts of apparatus on oil platforms, commercial heat exchangers, racecar engine blocks, and power generators. As David Jervis, Media Manager for GE Energy Measurement & Control says, “virtually any situation where you need to see inside something where your eye won’t take you.” The U.S. Air Force recently ordered a score of them, he says.

As is the case in ancient Jerusalem, technology designed for industry often turns out to have applications far beyond their initial intended use. “You’d say this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Jervis says, “but actually they’re doing something like it right now at the Tower of London, using the same equipment to inspect wooden horses there. You never know, we might find one thousand Greek soldiers inside.”