The New Bionic Eye From Bionic Vision Australia Will Have Disabled People Seeing The World In A Whole New Way
Posted on by Jerry in Disability Aids, Disability Products, Disabled Equipment, Disabled Living, Mobility Equipment
Bionic Vision Australia is doing great things. They are well on their way to releasing their first advanced prototype for a retinal prosthesis aka bionic eye. This retinal prosthesis will improve the sight of patients with disabilities stemming inherited and degenerative retinal diseases.
The first prototype is targeted towards patients suffering from serious mobility disabilities and light perception issues. A disability product like this would work towards giving the patient an improved quality of life. The disabled person would be able to distinguish between large objects and avoid bumping into them. While being able to now see the outlines of daily obstacles such as park benches, cars and buildings disabled people will be able to live more independently. We should be seeing the first implant of this prototype sometime in 2011.
The second prototype coming from Bionic Vision Australia will build on the first one and aims to deliver significantly improved resolution which will give disabled people the ability recognize faces and read large print. It’s focus will be on those disabled person who have issues with image perception. It is expected to improve on this disability thereby restoring vision to an acuity of better than 20/80. At this resolution a person with a mobility disability is will be able to read somewhere between the second and third lines of a Snellen chart. This prototype is set for its first human implant in 2013.
What makes the second prototype retinal prosthesis so much more advanced is that it has significantly more electrodes spaced over distances much closer to the ganglion cells. The proposed device also has a high speed bi directional data link. This combination will give this vision mobility product the edge that disable people need to improve their lives and live independently.
The main challenge with developing a bionic eye lies with improving the resolution you are able to offer the disabled person. A higher resolution leads to an improvement in the quality of life for disabled people.
