A brain implant has given a blind patient a primitive kind of vision, a researcher says. William Dobelle of the Dobelle Institute, a medical device company in New York, says he has perfected an artificial vision device involving a TV camera mounted on glasses.
Actual images emerge in an uneven pattern of dots, like the words on a stadium scoreboard.
With this limited vision, the patient is able to navigate the subway and read a simple eye chart, Dobelle says. Whether the device will work with patients blind from birth, who may lack a fully developed visual cortex, remains a question, Dobelle says. Results from that work, reported in the journal Neurosurgery , sparked public interest in artificial eyes 20 years ago. It has taken that long for computers to fulfill those hopes, Dobelle says. After getting the TV signal, more powerful computers now can trigger the brain electrodes in a regulated pattern in real time.