Scientists lauded for creating vision simulator

A Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech scientist has received a top award from an industry magazine for developing an artificial-retina designed to restore sight to the blind.

Wolfgang Fink and his associates at JPL/Caltech were among the 2009-10 R&D Magazine award recipients for their work in developing the Artificial Retinal Implant Vision Simulator — basically, a real-time camera that transmits images to blind retinas. The system allows for blind people to regain unaided mobility, and sometimes the ability to read large-type print.

“It is nice to be recognized,” Fink said of the award.

Fink’s work is in the laboratory and not with patients, so the award serves as a reminder of the impact of his research, he said. It is a process that allows the blind to see through video streaming and software processing. While the picture isn’t clear, users of the system can see pixelated images that they learn to recognize.

Patients wear a pair of specially designed eyeglasses with a mounted miniature camera that provides real-time images. Those are then streamed to an external processing unit that could be installed on a Blackberry cell phone or attached to a belt buckle. The images are sent from that device into another receiver that resembles a hearing aid or Bluetooth-type device behind the ear. That data is then released to the artificial retina’s electrode array.

The project — an extension of work done by Mark Humayun of the USC Doheny Eye Institute — is part of a collaboration among five national laboratories, four universities and a private company, and is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. In 2002, Humayun and his team implanted the first artificial retina device into the eye of a patient that had been blind for more than 50 years. Now about 30 additional volunteers around the world have had first and second generation implants. After the procedure, patients were able to distinguish light from dark and localize large objects, according to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The agency’s website includes the story of one patient who had been losing her sight for more than 30 years and totally blind the last 10. She said that she had to learn to connect the dots once her artificial-retina implant had been activated.

It took several visits to the lab at USC before she began to distinguish the patterns of lights she was seeing and the physical world.