Bionic eye for the blind

• April 20, 2024

The World Health Organization (WHO), estimates that the blindness and the visual weakness they affect 161 million people in the world; 90% of them live in underdeveloped nations.

However, there is the possibility of regaining vision thanks to bionic eyes. This innovation in the area of ​​health is already being applied by some countries. The most recent example is sponsored by the Australian government through the investment of more than 38 million dollars.

It consists of a bionic eye prototype that has a mini-camera placed on a lens that captures images and sends them to a processor that can be stored in your pocket; a device sends signals to the unit inside the retina that stimulates living neurons within it and that in turn send the images to brain .

How does it work...

The device is partially implanted in the eyeball and is designed for patients suffering from degenerative and hereditary vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa.

Although the Australian bionic eye does not provide a perfect view, it does make it possible for the person to be able to distinguish points of light that the brain could reconstruct in images.

Pioneer Mexico

In the United Kingdom since last year, an experimental program for the development and implantation of artificial vision through a bionic eye named Argus II.

It is an electronic device that is placed in the blind eye and connects wirelessly to sunglasses that have a camera and a video processor that capture what the person sees and convert it into electrical signals, according to the doctor Lyndon da Cruz , specialist in retinal surgery of the Moorfields Hospital From london.

However, the first country to successfully implement this technology was Mexico, at the Medical and Surgical Retina Center in Guadalajara.

The director of the center, Dr. Arturo Santos García, affirmed that thanks to this technique the patient is in a position to discriminate rudimentary images of movement, light and darkness: "Returning sight to blind people has been a dream that today is already a reality".