An incredible prosthetic

By Rechell McDonald
Bionic eyes. They are here, they are now. A Minneapolis-St. Paul man is now able to enjoy some semblance of sight after being in the dark for a decade due to a degenerative genetic disease that slowly robbed him of his vision.
Although the bionic eye, actually known as a retinal prosthesis, only allows him to make out shapes and the outlines of people at this time, it’s enabled him to gain awareness of his environment to the point where he no longer requires his cane to get around. The main problem with the device is that, of course, it does not recreate human sight perfectly. At this time, there are not enough electrodes in the device to render a perfect semblance of a person and then feed the data into his optic nerve.
It should be noted that this model of retina prosthetic is not ideal for every form of blindness. In the case of this initial test subject, only his photoreceptors were badly damaged by his condition, leaving a completely healthy optic nerve and the rest of the retina usable. The system itself is, also, not without its faults. It relays images in light flashes, more or less, that requires a person to adapt and learn how to interpret them. The entire prosthetic involves an implanted eye piece, a pair of glasses with a camera (that records the world), and a small computer attached to the person who receives and translates the image data into signals the eye piece can then translate to the brain.
While it’s far from ideal, and clearly is but a first-generation version of what will undoubtedly become a more sophisticated piece of equipment, for the test patient, his entire world has been altered for the better and he can now ‘see’ his wife again.