Artificial vision: Camera implanted in the eyeball
Jan 23rd, 2008 by admin
The folks at UCLA are getting ambitious. An engineer has devised a way to implant a camera in the eyeball for those who have impaired vision or lost an eye in an accident.
Implanting a micro-camera in an eyeball has been around for quite some years but it involved wires that made it impractical. The charging functionality was also a hurdle in developing this device for people with damaged vision.
The problems are solved now. According to the UCLA engineer, Michele Hauer who developed this technology, it is possible to develop a micro camera which can be charged wirelessly and communicates directly to a chip implanted at the back of the eye. The chip stimulates the nerves and the person can see everything. So there is no external hardware that needs to be taken care of.
The main problem with previous technologies was a wired link between retina and the external camera. There were lots of wires involved and the person with an artificial camera eye had to maintain external hardware in order to see properly.
Michele Hauer suggests that the present technology has advanced and it is possible to embed a tiny camera inside the lens of the eye. The camera will act as an artificial eye and it will communicate directly with the nerves that materialize the images and help us see things in their shape and size. The tiny micro camera has the capability of adapting corneal optical effects and has haptics to stabilize the position of the camera. It can be adjusted in the lens and the lens help camera to rotate or see the corners as we usually do with the normal eye. Moreover, the camera can develop the image and communicate with the nerve-stimulating chip connected to the nerves. This technology can provide a complete vision system for anyone who has impaired vision or no vision at all.
Michele has filed a patent for this technology. I hope it becomes available and included in medical devices sometime soon. This is great news for blind people or people with imperfect vision. Now don’t start packing those glasses and optical lenses. The New Scientist hasn’t given any date for the release. The creator has just filed a patent now. It might take him years to implement this technology.
I must say, it is an impressive idea and a great concept. In future, we might be able to develop cameras implanted in our eyes which can give us infrared vision or an optical zoom option so we can look at things more clearly. We will be able to throw out those infrared equipment and other instruments.
