Vision Tech Part 2

This is part 2 of the post about vision and the human eye. In the previous post, I talked about how there was new technology that is slowly helping blind people see, to an extent. Even though the vision is limited to light and dark and, with training, people utilizing the technology can make out the difference between certain things, there is still a long way to go before reaching the final goal of restoring one's vision. Almost like the holy grail of vision for scientists and doctors in this particular area of study.

Two years ago, a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz were able to create an advanced chip that could be implanted into the retina and send tiny electrical impulses that are in a certain code to the retinal Ganglion cells which can only be understand by those particular cells. The Ganglion cells would then send those signals through the optic nerve to the brain where they would be processed as normal vision. By using microchip detectors that line supercolliders to detect minute atomic level particles; and modelling the retinal chip with them, scientists were able to send more precise electrical impulses and help generate a better image than before.

Image taken from: MIT Technology Review. Electrodes are located on the golden circle in the center.

The impairment (no pun intended) of this technology is that it still relies on a host of other devices to help it function. Besides the micro chip implanted in the eye, there is a separate processor that gets a video feed from a tiny video camera mounted in the middle of a pair of glasses and converts that to a code which is decoded as electrical impulses by the microchip. The technology is called an artificial retina and is being manufactured and tested commercially by a company called Second Sight.

With improvements being made every year, it seems like there is a correlation between the quality of the image sent through electrical impulses and the amount of electrodes on the microchip. Such technology could become mainstream within the next decade.