Slashdot Mirror
Implant Gives Grayscale Vision To the Blind Using Lasers
MrSeb writes with a bit from Extreme Tech: "After a lot of theorizing, posturing, and non-human trials, it looks like bionic eye implants are finally hitting the market — first in Europe, and hopefully soon in the U.S. These implants can restore sight to completely blind patients — though only if the blindness is caused by a faulty retina, as in macular degeneration (which millions of old people suffer from), diabetic retinopathy, or other degenerative eye diseases. ... The Bio-Retina, developed by Nano Retina, is a whole lot more exciting. The Bio-Retina costs ... around the $60,000 [and] the 576-pixel vision-restoring sensor is actually placed inside the eye, on top of the retina. The operation only takes 30 minutes and can be performed under local anesthetic. Once installed, 576 electrodes on the back of the sensor implant themselves into your optic nerve. The best bit, though, is how the the sensor is powered: The Bio-Retina system comes with a standard pair of corrective lenses that are modified so that they can fire a near-infrared laser beam through your iris to the sensor at the back of your eye. On the sensor there is a photovoltaic cell that produces up to three milliwatts — not a lot, but more than enough."
This is super cool, if it works, but I'll shit golden sunshine before I let someone near my eyeball with a knife!
I think I'll wait for the high res apple version with retina display ;) The resolution on these bad boys blows.
(disclaimer, I hate apple but couldn't help myself).
I'm always happy for research done to improve mobility and functioning for disabled people. Not enough is done to help those who are vision, mobility, or hearing impaired. That said... be really careful out there. There's way too many people who are scared by anyone who looks different. Steve Mann was recently attacked for having a digital eye prothetic by employees of a McDonald's. There didn't appear to be any motive for the assault other than a fear of his prothetics. His family was with him at the time.
I've heard similar reports of people being attacked who have brain implants to deliver electrical stimulation due to epilepsy, depression, etc. If it's visible, sooner or later some stupid neanderthal bastard's going to attack you for it. I personally think it should be a hate crime to attack a disabled (or 'augmented') person... but it's still more science fiction than science fact to our legislators to consider, I think.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Every year, a new version will come out with less invasive surgery, better resolution, color... night mode... I hope they make these things somewhat easy to upgrade. Just imagining being able to switch visible spectrum has me wanting the future version for myself.
They claim a 24x24 pixel image. The video shows a low-resolution grey scale video of a kid on a swing. Looks fantastic if you consider going from blind to THAT. However I paused a frame and the kids head was 12 pixels wide. So the overall image is probably at least 120 to 240 wide - many times higher resolution than the device actually produces. So the video is not actually representative. With further advancements one can hope (expect?) that the resolution will increase over the years. Gives new meaning to "retina display".
So wonderful! My grandfather went blind towards the end of his life, or nearly so. Having sight again would have been something he dearly would have liked for reading. I hope this continues to advance and quickly for all those who are sight impaired.
Is just *why* the blind are using lasers!
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Never mind the parts that the author did not feel were important enough to mention:
1) the lasers
2) The power source for the lasers
Last I checked, standard corrective lenses didn't have anything batteries, electronics, or even the raw materials to make power sources or electronics.
They are just regular sharks. Well, apart from the friggin lasers on top of their heads!
Eyes ain't the only thing being replaced by tech
A buddy of mine is a type 1 diabetic; he was simply born with a faulty pancreas. For the majority of his life, he dealt with constant insulin injections, as typical for a diabetic. A few years back however, he was upgraded to an external pump. It looks just like an old beeper, and plugs into a semi-permanent* injection point under his shirt. Whenever he eats, he just has to push a few buttons on the pump and it steadily drips the correct amount of insulin into his blood stream
Of course, a pancreas isn't nearly as complex as an eye, so I'm glad to see science and medicine marching onward. Given that these advancements have happened in just a few short years, has me excited to see what will happen in this field within the next decade or so.
*semi-permanent: He stab himself once every few days, and there's a whole bracketing system roughly the size of a silver dollar that glues onto his skin and keeps the needle/tubing at the correct depth.
This signature is false.
If their power comes from a photovoltaic chip on corrective lenses, does that mean that you're going to wake-up blind every morning?
I'm hoping not only that resolution improves (and color, naturally), but why stop there? I wouldn't mind being able to see in UV bands and a telescopic lens would be nice.
I'm not knocking the progress on this optical implant, but it only does greyscale and without serious microsurgery, will never stop being greyscale only. She needs full color to regain what she lost.
There's no reason to believe that fancy microsurgery is required in order to visualize color. As a trivial example, nearly all color digital cameras have color filter arrays embedded over a monochrome sensor (other than foveon/sigma). It's not a big stretch to imagine that a future revision of this chip could have a color filter array and your brain (visual cortex) could learn to recognize different spatial encoding patterns as different colors.
That's similar to what your brain does now (although the retina helps by doing some type of local opponent-color coding). If the color mapping isn't easy for your brain to learn and you need a mapping more like your original mapping, in the worst case, you could even make the sensor configurable (stimulate different nerves for different colors). Although if you did this "simply" the pixels might be slightly scrambled, but that could be compensated for by using a really high resolution sensor (all cameras have multi-megapixel sensors these days), and then recoding to a lower resolution for output to the optic nerve.
All these things can be easily done on the sensor chip itself w/o requiring more advanced surgical techniques... Ah the wonder of silicon technology...
P.S. Dibs on the patents for this (or at least prior-art on the idea)...
A quick WikiP search indicated the latest evidence for effectiveness against cataracts of N-acc drops was not real solid (see 2008 Royal College of Opthalmologists statement), the the Wiki article also indicates subsequent evidence is available, but doesn't give a cite. As someone who's developing corneal opacities, I'm interested, can you give a cite or two? Tnx.
It's going to make Jiordi LaForge's vision prosthetic look as outdated as Kirk's flip phone in TOS.