Good News Cameras Bring Vision To The Blind

Blindness first began creeping up on Barbara Campbell when she was a teenager, and by her late 30s, her eye disease had stolen what was left of her sight. Reliant on a talking computer for reading and a cane for navigating New York, where she lives and works, Campbell, now 56, would have been thrilled to see something.

Now, as part of a striking experiment, she can. So far, she can detect burners on her stove when making a grilled cheese, her mirror frame, and whether her computer monitor is on. She is beginning a three-year project involving electrodes surgically implanted in her eye, a camera on the bridge of her nose and a video processor strapped to her waist.

The project, involving patients in the US, Mexico and Europe, is part of a burst of recent research aimed at one of science’s most-sought-after holy grails:making the blind see. Some of the 37 other participants further along in the project can differentiate plates from cups, tell grass from sidewalk, sort white socks from dark, distinguish doors and windows, identify large letters of the alphabet, and see where people are, albeit not details about them.

Scientists involved in the project, the artificial retina, say they have plans to develop the technology to allow people to read, write and recognize faces. With the artificial retina, a sheet of electrodes is implanted in the eye. The person wears glasses with a tiny camera, which captures images that the belt pack video processor translates into patterns of light and dark, like the “pixelized image we see on a stadium scoreboard,” said Jessy Dorn, a scientist at Second Sight Medical Products, which produces the device, collaborating with the US Department of Energy.

The video processor directs each electrode to transmit signals representing an object’s contours, brightness and contrast, which pulse along optic neurons into the brain.