BIONIC EYE TECHNOLOGY
More than 250 years later, blindness is still one of the most debilitating sensory impairments, affecting close to 40 million people worldwide. Many of these patients can be efficiently treated with surgery or medication, but some pathologies cannot be corrected with existing treatments.
In particular, when light-receiving photoreceptor cells degenerate, as is the case in retinitis pigmentosa, or when the optic nerve is damaged as a result of glaucoma or head trauma, no surgery or medicine can restore the lost vision.
In such cases, a visual prosthesis may be the only option. Similar to cochlear implants, which stimulate auditory nerve fibers downstream of damaged sensory hair cells to restore hearing, visual prostheses aim to provide patients with visual information by stimulating neurons in the retina, in the optic nerve, or in the brain’s visual areas.
| Bionic eye |
WORKING OF THE NORMAL EYE:
In a healthy retina, photoreceptor cells—the rods and cones—convert light into electrical and chemical signals that propagate through the network of retinal neurons down to the ganglion cells, whose axons form the optic nerve and transmit the visual signal to the brain.
Prosthetic devices work at different levels downstream from the initial reception and biochemical conversion of incoming light photons by the pigments of photoreceptor rods and cones at the back of the retina.
Implants can stimulate the bipolar cells directly downstream of the photoreceptors, for example, or the ganglion cells that form the optic nerve. Alternatively, for pathologies such as glaucoma or head trauma that compromise the optic nerve’s ability to link the retina to the visual centers of the brain, prostheses have been designed to stimulate the visual system at the level of the brain itself.
DEFINITION OF BIONIC EYE:
- The bionic eye system will consist of a small digital camera, external processor and a implant with a microchip and stimulating electrodes surgically placed in the back of the eye.
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| BIONIC EYE CONSTRUCTION |
- A bionic eye mimics the function of the retina to restore sight for those with severe vision loss. It uses a retinal implant connected to a video camera to convert images into electrical impulses that activate remaining retinal cells which then carry the signal back to the brain.
MAIN PARTS OF BIONIC EYE:
- A digital camera that's built into a pair of glasses. It captures images in real time and sends images to a microchip.
- A video-processing microchip that's built into a handheld unit. It processes images into electrical pulses representing patterns of light and dark and sends the pulses to a radio transmitter in the glasses.
- A radio transmitter that wirelessly transmits pulses to a receiver implanted above the ear or under the eye
- A radio receiver that sends pulses to the retinal implant by a hair-thin implanted wire
- A retinal implant with an array of 60 electrodes on a chip measuring 1 mm by 1 mm
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| Parts of bionic eye |
