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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Charging With Gust-O: GE and Urban Green Energy Build World’s First Wind-Powered EV Charger

Last summer, GE opened one of the first solar carports for charging electric vehicles in Plainville, Connecticut. The idea has caught on. Solar-powered EV “pumps” have started popping up across North America, from Toronto to Google’s California headquarters, and new ones are being built in Europe. Filling stations powered by wind, however, remained elusive. Until now.



GE has linked its fast DuraStation EV chargers, deployed in London during the Olympics to power a fleet of zero-emission cars, to a vertical wind turbine developed by New York’s Urban Green Energy. The result is the world’s first wind-powered EV charger. The system, called Sanya Skypump, can power up a Chevy Volt in four hours.

The Skypump rises just 15 feet and can stand virtually anywhere, including dense cityscapes. The innovative blades on the 4-kilowatt wind turbine do not spin horizontally, say, like propellers on airplanes, but rotate along the vertical axis inside a five-foot radius. It take operators just a couple of hours to assemble the turbine. Similar UGE turbines already power homes and streetlamps around the world.

GE and UGE installed the first Sanya Skypump outside Barcelona, Spain, but the partners will roll out more chargers later this year in the U.S. and Australia, at shopping malls, universities, and other busy locations.

GE Energy’s Charles Elazar said that the system is part of GE’s goal to offer drivers as well as commercial customers “a range of easy-to-use, flexible systems to help make electric vehicles a practical, everyday reality.”

GE Researchers to Investigate Link between Microgravity and Astronaut Vision Loss

There are many risks involved in spaceflight. Eye damage is one of stealthiest. NASA has documented at least seven cases where astronauts with healthy eyes returned to Earth with altered vision. For some, vision loss lasts only a few weeks. Others must live with the condition for much longer and in some cases it may not resolve. The cause remains unknown, but one possible culprit is elevated intracranial pressure caused by an extended stay in microgravity.

Space Oddity: NASA documented at least seven cases where astronauts with healthy eyes returned to Earth with altered vision.

A prototype of a space ultrasound probe.

Scientists from GE Global Research are helping NASA find the cause. They are building a new ultrasound probe and measurement techniques for tracking changes in astronaut vision. The aim of this probe is to deliver real-time, three dimensional pictures showing the entire globe of the eye and potential changes in its structure and functionality. “Spaceflight causes fluid to pool in the upper body and head, resulting in increased pressure in the head and the optic nerve,” says Aaron Dentinger, an electrical engineer in the Ultrasound Systems Lab at GE Global Research. “That could trigger a change in the shape of the eye leading to vision problems. So far, mild vision changes have been observed, but the potential for permanent damage is a major concern on longer term missions, making real-time monitoring in space crucial so that NASA can evaluate treatments.”

The scientists hope that the research could also advance the understanding of the underlying causes of traumatic brain injuries and lead to better monitoring of changes in brain pressure in people who sustain violent blows to the head.

A commercially available GE ultrasound machine already operates on the International Space Station. GE’s Vivid q cardiovascular ultrasound system was delivered during the space shuttle’s final flight a year ago. The new research, which will last for three years, could add new insight to the use of the instrument to image blood vessels around the eye.

Thomas Goes to Hollywood: There is Hardly an Industry that Thomas Edison Did Not Touch. New Book Gives Kids (and Adults) a Tour of His Genius

Where do tattoo needles come from? Once upon a time, there was a great inventor called the Wizard of Menlo Park. His name was Thomas Edison. One day, he built an electric pen designed to relieve clerks of the drudgery of duplicating documents. It had a sharp vibrating needle inside that traced text written on a sheet of paper. The needle punctured the text 50 times per second and turned it into a stencil. Ink would seep through the tiny holes and replicate the writing on sheets placed underneath. The invention, patented in 1876, didn’t exactly catch on, but it presaged the copy machine and, in the hands of artists, revolutionized tattooing.

Browsing through Gene Barretta’s fascinating new illustrated book on Edison, Timeless Thomas: How Thomas Edison Changed Our Lives, there’s barely an industry that has not been touched by Edison’s genius. The book is primarily for kids, but parents and grandparents will find inside much that is new and surprising. Yes, Edison built the light bulb, but he also developed an alkaline battery for the first electric vehicles, and launched the movie business in his Menlo Park lab by building the first film studio, called Black Maria, and the first motion picture camera. Less glamorous, but equally revolutionary were his power plants, cement kilns, and vending machines.

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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TimelessThomas1.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Edison built the first phonograph but he did not stop there. He installed a small version of the machine inside the first talking doll.[/image]
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Barretta does a great job bringing all of these inventions to life. He juxtaposes each colorful page dedicated to an Edison idea with a page showing the invention’s modern use.

Timeless Thomas is Barretta’s third book dedicated to inventors. He has written and illustrated books about Benjamin Franklin, Now & Ben: The Modern Inventions of Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci, Neo Leo: The Ageless Ideas of Leonardo da Vinci. He says that Edison belongs in their company. “He has been an idol of mine and I wanted to give the kids the same thrill,” Barretta says. “I wanted them to get acquainted with the world they are living in.”

Eine Kleine Knock Music: GE Engineer Used Music Theory to Prevent Engine Damage, Then Turned Sounds of Engine Trouble into Music

Good engineers have many handy tools hanging from their belts. Jeff Bizub has a degree in music theory. “Music theory is the engineering behind the art,” Bizub says. He used the theory to build a software version of his ear. It listens for knocking sounds inside massive GE engine cylinders. The sounds herald errant gas explosions that can cause cracks and severe engine damage. Bizub transcribed his knocking recordings into notes and set them in a short musical piece titled Knock Music.

Knock, Knock: Jeff Bizub turned sounds of engine trouble into music. “When I was hearing the knocking frequencies, I was hearing notes,” he says.

Bizub is a senior product engineer at GE’s Waukesha engine plant. But he also holds a degree in music theory from the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. A few years ago, he tried to solve a problem afflicting large spark ignition engines. These engines work the same way as the engine inside ordinary passenger cars, but are much larger. The Waukesha 275GL* gas engine, for example, generates 4,800 horsepower and clocks in at 66,000 pounds. It can power a small power plant.

The cylinders of such engines are so large, almost 11 inches in diameter, that the heat and pressure inside can ignite hot gas squeezed against the wall of the cylinder before the flame from the sparkplug at the center gets to it. That’s when trouble starts. There are now two flame “fronts” traveling in opposite directions, one from the wall and the other from the center. When these fronts crash into each other, they make the walls of the cylinder vibrate, emitting a characteristic knocking sound. This is called “knock.” Uncontrolled knocking can cause dangerous piston and engine damage, not to mention less power and more emissions.

Engineers used to listen for just the one frequency of the knocking sound but Bizub, who has perfect hearing, had a different idea. “The engine is like a musical instrument,” he says. “The shape of a flute or a clarinet plays a dramatic role in the sound they produce.” What if he could use music theory to decipher and tame knocking?

Bizub started running tests with an engine going into knock in GE’s Waukesha engineering lab. “I put my ear against the cylinder and could hear even with earmuffs on the multiple frequencies inside," he says. "I knew that there was a center frequency related to bore size, but as with any instrument you’ll have multiple vibrations that will occur.”

Some of the knocking frequencies were inaudible to an untrained ear. But what if he built a machine with perfect pitch that could hear knock and also ignore false positives. “The first line of defense is to determine very accurately when it is true knock and not some other noise,” he says. Bizub convinced his boss to buy a 16-channel digital recorder in a music store for $1,200. He also purchased a suite of music software to analyze the spectrum and the frequency of the knocking sounds, and a 64-band equalizer to amplify the inaudible frequencies related to knock. “The idea was to capture these sounds as wave files, analyze them with the music software, and plot out what’s going on,” he says.

Bizub and a team of researchers used the results to write industrial software and algorithms that now sit inside a module attached to every Waukesha engine, listen for knocking, and adjust and retard ignition if they hear the tell-tale knock sound. The device is called Engine System Manager* (ESM). The ESM has much better signal to noise ratio that standard methods. It detects knocks more accurately and at lower, less dangerous amplitudes. It keeps the engine humming, adjusting ignition timing proportionally to the severity of the knocking.

But Bizub did not stop there. “When I was hearing the knocking frequencies, I was hearing notes,” he says. “When you study composition music theory, you work on ear training and transcribe sounds in your head to musical pitches so you can understand them further.” He took engine knocking samples, one from a big bore rich burn engine and the other from a lean burn machine, added some echo for ambiance, and called the score Knock Music. “Like electronic music or early R&B rap music, I was stringing samples together and creating something new,” he says. “I can’t take credit for writing the music because really the engines wrote it.”


* Trademark of the General Electric Company

Ken and the Art of Jet Engine Maintenance: How Father-Daughter Team Learned to Fix Jet Engines on the Kansas Prairie

Kenny Glasgow has never set foot in an executive suite but that didn’t stop him from flying to work. In the 1960s, Glasgow was fixing jet engines at GE’s Strother Field plant in Kansas, and saved up wages for a small Cessna 150 two-seater plane. “One fall the Arkansas River flooded and the road to Strother was closed for a several days,” Glasgow says. “I had about a quarter of a mile of alfalfa just east of the house. You could land down there when it wasn’t too tall. So I just flew to work.”

Glasgow gets things done. He spent almost four decades at GE, getting in on the ground level as a “heavy helper” in the maintenance department, and soaring to a leadership job on GE’s classified work for the B-2 stealth bomber. “The company raised my family,” he says. “It turned out to be heaven sent.”

Glasgow, now 75, grew up on a farm six miles from Strother that his grandfather settled in 1871. “Wrench turning was not all that unfamiliar,” he says. “On the farm, you kept most of your things running yourself.”

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Radioman: Kenny Glasgow sporting a flight jacket outside his barracks in Argentia, Newfoundland. Glasgow served in the U.S. Navy as a radioman on surveillance planes flying over the north Atlantic from 1954 until 1958. He joined GE in 1961.
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Kenny Glasgow with his daughter Kathryn. “My father swears that aviation is in our blood,” Kathryn says.
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He joined the NAVY from high school, and after active duty as a radioman on the Warning Star surveillance planes he found work on an oil rig. When the rig shut down, “my brother and I were looking in the paper for something to do to get groceries,” Glasgow says.

GE’s Strother engine repair and assembly plant was a decade old when the Glasgow brothers started, earning $1.78 ½ per hour. “That was a pretty good wage at the time,” Glasgow says.

He started by working nightshifts, drilling holes in concrete hangar floors to install machinery. But he soon advanced and started servicing and testing GE’s J73 and J85 jet engines. He learned on the job, from technical manuals and from other workers. “The foremen knew because most of them had done the job before,” Glasgow says. “They came through the ranks.”

He also learned from engineers at the plant. “It took me quite a while to be able to listen at the level they were talking, but once I caught on, they were like a walking book of knowledge,” Glasgow says.

In the late 1960s, Glasgow bought the Cessna and took his family on flying expeditions. One of his daughters, Kathryn, was smitten. “I remember spending weekends polishing that thing,” she says. “It was our family time. My father swears that aviation is in our blood.”

Kathryn got introduced to GE and Strother as a girl. “We’d bring dad dinner and get to spend a little more time with him,” she says. When it was her turn to graduate from high school, she went straight to the plant. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I always knew that I wanted to work here,” Kathryn says.

Like her father, Kathryn started at the bottom and now leads a team that repairs engines for Apache and Black Hawk helicopters. “There weren’t many women here when I was hired,” she says. “My dad was a protector, he was not afraid to say something to somebody.”

Glasgow taught her how to fix airplanes, shape tools, and find new solutions to problems. “He expected a lot, he wanted you to know a lot,” she says. When Kathryn decided to apply for an inspector job, she says, her father challenged her to read a measuring tool, the C – micrometer. “She could not do it, but by golly she learned quickly,” Glasgow laughs.

Glasgow retired from Strother in 1998, when the B-2 work was over. With more than 800 employees, the plant is one of the largest employers on Cowley County, Kansas. “This is a small community,” Glasgow says. “It’s like a family operation.”

Community Health Pioneer Says GE Grant Will Help Cut Primary Care Doctor Shortage

Dr. H. Jack Geiger in a cotton field near Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

When Dr. H. Jack Geiger opened America’s first community health clinics in the cotton fields of segregated Mississippi and a poor Boston neighborhood, five decades ago, many of his patients had never seen a doctor. “There were enormous gaps in the health status of the African American, Native American and Hispanic populations, minority groups, and poor whites as well,” Geiger says. “There was a lot of need and community health centers were invented to deal with that need.”

More than a thousand of such centers across the country now serve 17 million minority and low-income patients. They stand as a testament to Geiger’s pioneering work, but need still remains. The United States is facing a looming deficit of primary care physicians. According to some estimates, the country will be short of 40,000 primary care doctors by 2020. This trend, combined a sharp rise in medical costs, “is not just a problem for vulnerable populations,” Geiger says. “It’s rapidly becoming a problem for the whole nation.”

Geiger says that U.S. medical care is “badly skewed to the extent that we are oversupplied with specialists,” and that “developed nations that have strong primary care networks are delivering not only the best primary care but also the most efficient.”



The GE Foundation has committed $50 million for more than 70 community health centers in 20 states to improve access to healhtcare. This week the foundation also made a $2.3 million grant to the National Medical Fellowship (NMF), where Geiger is a board member. The grant will help train future primary care physicians, nurses and doctor’s assistants at five community health centers in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Nashville, and Jackson, Mississippi. Students will learn clinical skills in neighborhoods with shortage of doctors and receive mentoring from local staff. The goal of the grant is to help launch a pipeline of primary care physicians to community centers around the country.

Geiger says that twice as many students applied as there were places for the first round. “There are few if any programs like this,” Geiger says. “It is this kind of team workforce that will be increasingly the way that medical care is delivered in the future.”