Towards a Smart Bionic Eye (Audio Described Version)

Meet the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award winners behind a ground-breaking project. These researchers bring together artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and visual prostheses - retinal and brain implants referred to as “bionic eyes” - in hopes of one day providing better assistive technology for incurable blindness that affects about 40 million people worldwide.
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Transcript:
[Michael Beyeler] There's up to 6 million people worldwide who live with profound blindness. And the idea of a visual prosthesis is really to replace lost functionality with an implant. Even though these devices are already out there, the vision they can provide is rather limited.
[Jason Esterhuizen] What I see is nothing like the vision I had before. It's a totally new way of seeing or interpreting vision.
[Michael Beyeler] The goal of this project is to build what I like to call a smart bionic eye, which is the idea of combining A.I. smarts with a visual prosthesis for people who are blind. Rather than working towards one day restoring natural vision. Would it be better to find ways to provide practical and useful artificial vision today? So these are the glasses that come with the Argus II as well as the Orion device.
[Michael Beyeler] You can see a small miniature camera here in the front.
[Jason Esterhuizen] This is the coil that you attach, and this coil communicates to the device implanted in your brain.
[Michael Beyeler] So the implant only has a six by ten electrode grid and move my finger in front. And you can see that there is motion, but it's really hard to pick up any shapes.
[Jason Esterhuizen] When I look over there, I see a very bright light coming in. That might be the sliding door. And then all of the dark gaps that I see, those might be objects in the room. So this is where Dr. Beyeler’s work would play a very crucial role into filling these gaps for me. I can see something, but I don't know what it is.
[Jason Esterhuizen] But with A.I. or with object recognition technology integrated into this device, I would be able to look at it and it would be able to tell me; that's a human, that’s a car, that’s a trashcan, whatever.
[Michael Beyeler] The important part of our approach is that it shouldn’t just be me, a sighted researcher sitting in my office thinking about what would be helpful, but to actually incorporate the help of these bionic eye users and blind researchers at all stages of the development.
[Lucas Gil Nadolskis] A lot of research that has been done for blind people has been done by sighted people, and the problems with that varies. The main one being that sighted people don't know the challenges that we have. You know, the target population is blind people. It doesn't matter if it looks cool on the paper, it needs to be useful.
[Michael Beyeler] A big advantage of our approach is that we are using virtual reality. The current implants produce a very limited field of view, so it's like watching TV from across the room and putting the goggles on myself. I could really experience that and realize how hard this really is.
[Jason Esterhuizen] If a smart bionic eye gets developed through this research, it's going to change the life of millions of people around the world, not just myself. And blindness will not be an issue anymore.
[Lucas Gil Nadolskis] It's my life's work, right. It's more than research. For a lot of people working with this it's a cool little project. For me, it's deeply personal. It's the goal of my life.
[Michael Beyeler] I think this research would not have been possible without the support of the National Library of Medicine or the National Institutes of Health, simply because of its scope and its difficulty. But we do believe that we have put the groundwork in to make this happen.
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