Scientists have developed a new prosthetic device that sends images directly to the brain, a technology they say could be used to help blind humans in less than a decade.
The device, which was developed by a team at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University and tested on animals, takes information from the outside world and decodes it into a pattern that the brain can “read” as an image. Neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg , who led the research, explained that the key was converting the data into patterns of electrical activity for the brain to process.
Patterns of pulses coming out of the eye tell the brain what is seen. With the blind person, the brain no longer gets the necessary visual information from the eye. Her prosthetic, with its encoder and transducer, can send out signals that the brain can understand.
Prof Nirenberg explained that if a person has a retinal disease, there’s very little that can be done for them, with drug treatments only effective on a small number of sufferers. There are prosthetic devices, but they only allow patients to see simple images, mainly just outlines. But the new device is something “that could make a difference”.
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