Brain implant can restore sight to blind people

A pair of modified glasses connected to the patient's brain processes a live video stream and transforms it into electronic signals.

By Valentin Cimino - @ciminix Posted on February 11, 2020 at 3:44 p.m.

Professor Eduardo Fernandez, director of neuro-engineering at the University of Miguel Hernandez, and his team have managed to restore sight to Bernardeta Gómez , a person who has been blind for more than fifteen years .

Get your sight back with a brain implant

Bernardeta Gómez is a 57 year old Spanish woman. At the age of 42, toxic optic neuropathy destroyed the nerve bundles that connect his eyes to his brain. Since then, she has been completely blind and can no longer even detect light . After years of darkness, researchers have managed to restore her sight, at least partially. Indeed, if Bernardeta Gómez distinguishes new shapes, points or light beams, she has not recovered all of her abilities .

This feat was made possible thanks to the work carried out by the researchers on a pair of modified , blackened glasses equipped with a tiny camera. The electronic device is directly connected to a computer which processes a live video stream and transforms it into electronic signals. The helmet is also connected to the back of the patient's skull. In reality, the glasses are directly connected to an implant composed of a hundred electrodes , placed in the visual cortex behind the brain of Bernardeta.

More and more technologies are being developed to enable blind people to gain autonomy. We obviously think of Seeing AI : the application with AI developed by Microsoft for the blind. The application is based on machine learning , and more precisely on the recognition of objects and landscapes. It allows the blind to hear an audio description of the photo of their choice.

Bright prospects for the blind

Professor Eduardo Fernandez, the originator of this technology, hopes to be able to restore sight to the 36 million blind people around the world . The technique developed by the professor is particularly interesting because it bypasses the eye and the optic nerves to focus only on the brain. Indeed, it is important to note that the vast majority of the blind, like Bernardeta Gómez, have lesions in the nervous system that connects the retina to the back of the brain.

The professor explains that: “Bernardeta was our first patient, but over the next two years, we will be installing implants in five other blind people. We had done similar experiments on animals, but the problem is that a cat or a monkey cannot explain what it sees ” .

This operation is particularly cumbersome. Bernardeta's brain had to be operated on to install the implant: a risky operation. Six months later, the researchers had to remove the prosthesis because it was not approved for long-term use. This first patient has to deal with numerous MRIs of the brain to verify that everything is going well. Either way, it's a major breakthrough for science.