Braille has been used for many years to allow people with blindness and severe vision loss to still be able to read. Recently, scietnists and researchers have come up with a way to actually have blinde people to read braille. The Argus II retinal prosthetic is a prosthetic that captures images through a camera that is placed on the viewers face. This is connected to an electrode array implemented on the eye. The imaged that are captured are converted to eletrical signals and tranferred over to the electrode array, which stimulates nerves in the retina. It gives the wearer a realtime display of what is going on in front of them. How it works is that there is a sort of braille visualizer, which converts the visual alphabet into their corresponding braille arrangement. For example, if a wearer is facing a sign or board then the visual perception they would have is the allignment of the braille dots in the same order as the letters on the board. In this study, the subject was blind with retinitis pigmentosa and with the new technoloy was able to recognize single letters 89% of the time. He correctly recognized 80% of 2 letter words, 60% of three letter words and 70% of 4 letter words. Clearly, this revolutionary technology has helped these blind people improve their vision to some extent. In the future, do you think that technology will come as far as to completely eliminate blindness with the implementation of technology similar to that desbribed above? Do you think that this type of technology will be readily available for qualified patients in the near future?
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507796/bionic-eye-lets-a-blind-person-see-braille/
This is very interesting. Were the patients in the study born blind? Some time ago i watched a special on those without vision. The documentary stated that those who never had sight were unable to gain it because the brain had never "learned" to see. How does this new technology counteract that? Would it just be successful in those who lost sight? Does it account for damage to the eye? great article!
ReplyDeleteThis is an intriguing and revolutionary article. This seems to be a discovery that could have huge potential down the road with further improvements. Just think, if a blind person is able to recognize small words most of the time, there is definitely a possibility that in the future that could be developed into seeing everything normally. I believe that in the future, there will be enough technology to improve this technique, and there will be more time for testing on blind people. However, I do not think it is possible in the near future, as this study is a very sensitive one. Although they already lost their vision, testing could lead to other difficulties on their other senses. This technique needs to be proceeded with caution, especially in the near future.
ReplyDeleteI also think this is quite fascinating. It does not seem as though many people would ever dream, even despite all of the technological advancements within the past hundred or so years, that there would be a possibility for the blind to see. I would also like to know if this adaptation works for the individuals who are born blind, or just for those who lost this sense at some later point in life. Either way, this discovery coincides with one of the advancements made on 'Star Trek' surprisingly well - Geordi LaForge's VISOR. In his case, this Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement allowed him to see through the electromagnetic spectrum. Here's a link to another article that continues this thought, and provides an additional study, if anyone is interested.
ReplyDeletehttp://electronics.howstuffworks.com/10-star-trek-technologies7.htm