ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Monday, May 27, 1996                   TAG: 9605300003
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1    EDITION: HOLIDAY 
DATELINE: FISHERSVILLE
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER 

COMMANDING A WHEELCHAIR TO MOVE

Like many Americans who watched the Academy Awards this year, Jamie Roberts and Joe Langevin were inspired by the sight of actor Christopher Reeve on the stage in his wheelchair.

Roberts, like Reeve, is a paraplegic who must use a ventilator to breathe. He knows the difficulty of getting about in a motorized wheelchair and all the bulky, heavy equipment it requires.

Langevin is a defense contractor who developed voice-operated controls for Army spies using communications equipment behind enemy lines and for soldiers operating tanks in combat.

Langevin saw that Reeve, who broke his neck a year ago during an equestrian event at Culpeper, guided his wheelchair by sucking and puffing on a straw, using air movements as a toggle switch. He also noticed that the ``Superman'' star often had to pause until the ventilator filled his lungs.

``I was watching him like a hawk,'' the president of Tracer Round Associates said. ``I thought, `We can do better than that.'''

Now, Langevin's company in Alexandria and the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center in the Shenandoah Valley are working together to build a wheelchair that can be controlled solely by spoken commands.

The hidden microphone can detect a mere whisper, and is immune to ambient noise, which Langevin said is a major problem with most voice-recognition technologies.

The vocal commands for Tracer Round's technology can be simple, consistent utterances. An ``r'' sound, for example, could be the order for reverse.

They expect to have a clinically tested prototype before Dec. 31.

Langevin was a Special Forces officer in Vietnam who knew firsthand how dangerous it was to talk into a hand-held radio with enemy soldiers nearby. You couldn't fire a rifle at the same time, and snipers sometimes would target the noise or trace the coordinates of the transmissions.

His private company developed technology that records sounds from a concealable microphone and translates them into digital language a computer can understand. The technology later was used for tanks and other Army vehicles whose drivers must operate computerized controls in rough terrain.

Langevin estimates the vocal controls will add no more than a few thousand dollars to the cost of a motorized wheelchair.

One of the first customers may be Roberts. His wheelchair, crafted at the rehabilitation center, is outliving its usefulness.

Roberts is one of several hundred thousand people in the United States who have lost the use of their muscles below the neck, either through injury or degenerative diseases such as cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis.

Tracer's estimate of the number of quadriplegics is 250,000, based on studies by the University of California at San Francisco, the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center and the United Cerebral Palsy Association.

Roberts was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy before his fourth birthday. At age 7, he was given leg braces. By 10, he was in a wheelchair. And shortly before his high school graduation, his respiratory system shut down and he was placed on a ventilator.

A few years ago, the muscles in his hands deteriorated to the point where he could no longer move the joystick controlling his motorized wheelchair, and his breathing was too weak to operate a sip and puff mechanism.

David Law, a rehabilitation engineer at the center, redesigned Roberts' wheelchair so that he could control it by pushing two switches with his right and left index fingers.

But Roberts, 23, is beginning to lose strength in his fingers and will be unable to move them at all before long.

Roberts, whose main passion is stock-car racing, smiles at the thought of a voice-operated wheelchair.

``I'm the type of person who likes to go out and go places,'' he said. He travels often to the mall and goes to the polls to vote in every election. ``It gives me some independence and confidence that I can do a few things myself.''

``You see Christopher Reeve struggling and you see he's robbed of his dignity,'' Law said. ``This is going to revolutionize life for these folks.''

LENGTH: Medium:   80 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. Joe Langevin (left), president of Tracer Round 
          Associates, and David Law, an engineer at the Woodrow Wilson 
          Rehabilitation Center, are developing a voice-activated wheelchair. 
          color.