A team of scientists from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston has developed a brain implant that allows the blind to "see" the shape of letters.
The device transmits visual information from the camera directly to electrodes implanted in the brain. This is a step towards a "visual prosthesis" that would allow the blind to fully recover their visual function.
Participants in the study were able to "see" the outlines of the figures thanks to complex sequences of electrical impulses sent to their brains. “When we used electrical stimulation to dynamically track letters directly on the brains of the patients, they were able to 'see' the shapes of the letters and correctly identify them,” commented senior author Daniel Yoshore. "They described seeing luminous spots or lines forming letters."
The new device differs from the previous ones in that earlier models treated each electrode as a pixel. This time, scientists, instead of trying to build figures from several spots of light, worked with outlines.
Such a device could have a serious impact on the lives of blind and visually impaired people. However, its development is still in its early stages, as the brain is an extremely complex organ.
“The primary visual cortex, into which the electrodes were implanted, contains half a billion neurons,” the study said. “This time, we only stimulated a small fraction of these neurons with multiple electrodes. So the next step is to work with neuroengineers to create arrays with thousands of electrodes."
Ekaterina Belchikova
