Bionic Eye Essay Conclusion

The Bionic Eye

More than 40 million people across the world that suffer from blindness, but the bionic eye has advanced leaps and bounds ahead of its time and it could recover a very large portion of their blindness (Bhojani). The advancements in the visual prosthesis field started with the invention of the cortical prosthetic. Since then, there has been a variety of different devices which target different places along the visual processing pathway. These devices can be broken down into categories depending upon where the device is taking action. The history and development of these devices can be broken down into two different categories: electrical stimulation, and electronic prosthesis (Ong).

The development that had to happen in order for the bionic eye to be as advanced as it is now took several decades. The developmental process in creating visual prosthesis began by electrically stimulating different parts of the occipital pole, which is a big part of processing visual information. The first time electrical stimulation was done was in 1929 by a German neurologist named Otfrid Foerster. Foerster discovered that electrically stimulating the occipital pole, his patient would describe a sensation of a small spot of light, which were phosphenes. Then 2 years later, Krause and Schum electrically stimulated a patient in his left occipital pole who has been hemianopic for 8 years and this produced similar phosphenes. A phosphene is a luminous image produced by mechanical stimulation of the retina. This proves that the visual cortex does not lose all its functions even through years of visual deprivation (Ong). From this

Bommireddy 2 resulted in research into creating electronic prosthetics to allow people to have all or at least ...

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...to measure these on blind subjects because they have a very low baseline vision. Testing that is done is very inticate and is very time consuming and it is individualized depending on each person’s level of impairment and how much sight needs to be restored (Ong). One type of testing that is done is gene therapy which is taking damaged genes and replacing them with new ones (Sebastian). Other tests include light perception, localization of light and motion, and double versus single flash discrimination. Also a standardized psyco-physical assessment needs to be done which tests the relationship between physical stimuli and sensory response. All these tests give the best

Bommireddy 4 results of even improvement in vision by using any prosthetic. Before getting to the testing and implanting stage there had to be many human trials to test out the prosthetics (Ong).