Blindness is arguably one of the things that have the ability to turn someone's life around. The disease carries a huge mental and physical strain on its victim, especially if the patient was not born blind. As such, finding a cure for its developed forms has been a long-standing goal for experts, one that has come closer to fulfillment in recent years. A new device brings the objective even closer. Made up of black sunglasses and an electric “lollipop,” the instrument promises to allow the blind and the visually impaired to sense some of the things around them.
The basis of the new BrainPort device relies on a hypothesis set forth in the 1960s by now-late neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita,
Scientific American reports.
The expert then proposed that we actually saw with our brain, and not the eyes themselves, which were only a conduit for optical/electrical signals. As such, the new system makes use of this idea in an innovative way. The black sunglasses are outfitted with small cameras, which collect images from the environment.
These images are then sent to a handheld, central processing unit, which, among other things, converts the light waves into electrical signals, in very much the same way the human retina does in the healthy eye. The signals are then transmitted into an electrode array, located on the wearer's tongue. At a size of about nine square centimeters, each of the electrodes on the array corresponds to a certain number and color of pixels. For example, electrodes conveying white light generate the strongest signals, whereas the black ones generate none.
What happens next is not clearly known. The science team at the Middleton, Wisc.–based Wicab, Inc., the instrument's producer, does not know where the electrical signal goes – either in the visual cortex, which usually processes images, or in the somatosensory cortex, which regularly processes pressure on the tongue. The thing is that, after about 15 minutes of using BrainPort, the patients can start interpreting visual information to some extent. The team says that the sensors are directly correlated to the environment. If light appears on the left, then only the left-side electrodes will “fire” on the tongue.
“It becomes a task of learning, no different than learning to ride a bike. [The] process is similar to how a baby learns to see. Things may be strange at first, but over time they become familiar,” Wicab neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen says. The company's President and Chief Executive Officer, Robert Beckman, explains that he plans to submit the device to the FDA for approval by the end of this month. He hopes that, by early 2010, the machine will become commercially available, at a price of roughly $10,000.
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