Technologies to Cure Night Blindness/ Tunnel Vision

Good news for the people who are visually aided with Retinitis Pigmentosa or otherwise known as Night Blindness or Tunnel Vision. 
It is a tiny implantable microchip permitted patients, who had given up on seeing again to read a clock or identify daily objects. The wafer-thin device is to be implanted for the first time in University of Oxford and London, with surgery scheduled within weeks, the Daily Mail reported. Most of the middle-aged patients were to be treated for retinitis pigmentosa.

 A microchip packed with 1,500 light sensors is implanted to the back of the eye. The sensors convert light to electrical signals, which stimulate nerves in the retina to pass down signals to optic nerve which would gap into the brain to form an image.


Technology varies with different Universities and researchers worldwide are trying to find ways to use electronics to improve visual recognition.
 Last year, MIT announced it had developed a chip implant that could restore vision in some patients. MIT’s eyeball design holds a microchip that connects to an external coil on a pair of glasses
. The chip receives visual information and activates electrodes that, in turn, fire the nerve cells that carry visual input to the brain.

While Bionic Vision Australia uses an external camera — with resolution of up to 5 megapixels — mounted on a pair of glasses. An electrode array is implanted in the eye and that connects to the central part of the retina where the greatest number of retinal neurons are present. An external unit has vision-processing software to help generate the electrical impulses. The communication between the electrode implant and the external unit is wireless.
“The camera itself doesn’t need to be very powerful because the quality of the image isn’t the crucial component,” says Burkitt the research director of Bionic Vision Australia. “What’s important is the vision-processing software that picks up the image and transforms it into electrical impulses.”


The resultant vision is not the same as the images that a sighted person sees. Instead it’s a pixelated version with a relatively small number of dots: about 100 in early versions. But it’s a beginning, says Burkitt. Meanwhile, the team is also working on the next version of the bionic eye that will include 1,000 electrodes, delivering 10 times the resolution. It will be made of platinum, instead of the polycrystalline diamond used for the first one, so more electrodes can be packed in and better images generated.