Retinal implant shines light on artificial vision

This is the claim of a team led by Diego Ghezzi, who have been developing the system since 2015.

"Our system is designed to give blind people a form of artificial vision by using electrodes to stimulate their retinal cells," said Ghezzi, who holds the Medtronic Chair in Neuroengineering (LNE) at EPFL's School of Engineering in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Intraneural electrode stimulates light sensation for the blind

The camera embedded in the smart glasses captures images in the wearer's field of vision, and sends the data to a microcomputer placed in one of the eyeglasses' end-pieces. The microcomputer turns the data into light signals which are transmitted to electrodes in the retinal implant. The electrodes then stimulate the retina in such a way that the wearer sees a simplified, black-and-white version of the image. This simplified version is made up of dots of light that appear when the retinal cells are stimulated. However, wearers must learn to interpret the many dots of light in order to make out shapes and objects.