Bionic eyes are letting blind people see: From @TiyoLabs team

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As technology has advanced in the past few years, it seems like no health condition is unconquerable anymore. Prosthetics have been one of the most successful medical invention. The newest invention on the block is the bionic eye, which is essentially prosthetics for the eyes.

This device can provide sight, the detection of light to people who have gone blind from degenerative eye diseases like Macular Degeneration and Retinitis Pigmentosa. 10% of people over the age of 55 suffer from various stages of Macular Degeneration. Retinitis Pigmentosa is an inherited disease that affects about 1.5 million people around the world.

The entire system runs on a battery pack that’s housed with the video processing unit. When the camera captures an image?—?for instance, a dog?—?the image is in the form of light and dark pixels. It sends this image to the video processor, which converts the dog-shaped pattern of pixels into a series of electrical pulses that represent light and dark.

When the pulses reach the retinal implant, they excite the electrode array. The array acts as the artificial equivalent of the retina’s photoreceptors. The electrical signals generated by the stimulated electrodes then travel as neural signals to the visual center of the brain through optic nerves.

In Macular Degeneration and Retinitis Pigmentosa, the optical neural pathways aren’t damaged. The brain, in turn, interprets these signals as a tree and tells the subject, “You’re seeing a dog.” It takes some training for people to actually see the object clearly. At first, they mostly see light and dark spots. But after a while, they learn to interpret what the brain is showing them, and they eventually perceive that pattern of light and dark as a dog.

The newest version of the system should offer great image resolution because it has far more electrodes included. Researchers are already planning a third version that has a thousand electrodes on the retinal implant, which they believe could allow facial-recognition capabilities. Researchers elsewhere are testing devices that would be able to bypass the retina and stimulate the brain directly.