Towards a Smart Bionic Eye: Artificial Vision for People Who Are Blind

Today, over 10 million people worldwide are living with profound visual impairment, and retinal neuroprostheses (“bionic eye”, Fig. 1) are being developed to restore vision to these individuals. Analogous to cochlear implants, these devices electrically stimulate surviving retinal cells to evoke visual percepts (“phosphenes”). Existing devices generally provide an improved ability to localize high-contrast objects and perform basic orientation & mobility tasks.

However, the quality of current prosthetic vision is still rudimentary. A major outstanding challenge is translating electrode stimulation into a code that the brain can understand. Interactions between the device electronics and the retinal neurophysiology lead to distortions that can severely limit the quality of the generated visual experience.

Rather than aiming to one day restore natural vision (which may remain elusive until we fully understand the neural code of vision), we might be better off thinking about how to create practical and useful artificial vision now. We can already make things appear brighter the closer they get or use computer vision to highlight important objects in the scene. In the future, these visual augmentations could be combined with GPS to give directions, warn users of impending dangers in their immediate surroundings, or even extend the range of visible light with the use of an infrared sensor (think bionic night-time vision). Once the quality of the generated artificial vision reaches a certain threshold, there are a lot of exciting avenues to pursue.