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Group to test direct-to-brain bionic eye on human patients

Novel approach from team out of Australia has led to unprecedented success in developing field

The team believes that their solution will effectively provide vision to nearly 85% of those declared clinically blind. This is important because there’s already close to 300 million visually impaired people in the world, so research into how to restore vision for this growing group has long since passed the critical point.

Bionic eyes are nothing new — they’ve actually been around for quite some time.

The direct-to-brain bionic eye

This is what makes the MVG’s approach so unique: The doctors are completely bypassing the complexities that come with trying to reconstruct the complexities of the human eye. Instead, what they’ve developed is a pair of glasses that have tiny, high-resolution cameras in them to serve as the eye’s retina. Video recorded by these cameras is sent to a pocket-worn digital processing unit that converts the camera’s recorded video into electrical signals which, in turn, get sent to a microchip implanted directly on the surface of the patient’s visual cortex (located in the back the brain).

More specifically, specially written algorithms transform the camera’s image data to a pattern that gets wirelessly transmitted to the micro-sized electrodes on the brain implant chip. Upon receiving these signals, the chip responds with the appropriate voltage, current, and timing to stimulate an image within the visual cortex of the brain.

The results right now are rudimentary, black-and-white images, but many believe that this is the start of a very promising, alternative approach to providing sight to the visually impaired.

Humans are pretty fragile. A bad break in your hip can mean surgery and months of rehab. That’s pretty bad, but what if you fall and break your hip on the Moon, or even Mars?

Luckily for our Mars-bound descendants, the European Space Agency has a solution: an information-loaded assisted reality helmet that will let anyone identify and perform minor surgery to repair injuries.

The Computer Assisted Medical Diagnosis and Surgery System, CAMDASS, is a wearable augmented reality helmet that injects computer generated models and information directly into the wearer’s field of view.