Visual implant helps the blind read Braille

A group of French and American researchers has succeeded in developing an ocular device that has allowed to transmit first braille patterns directly into the retina of a blind patient who has been able to read four letter words accurately and quickly.

"In this clinical test with a single blind patient, we bypassed the camera that is the usual input for the implant and directly stimulated the retina. Instead of feeling the braille on the tips of his fingers, the patient could see the patterns we projected and then read individual letters in less than a second with up to 89% accuracy," explains researcher Thomas Lauritzen, lead author of the paper.

The study, published in "Frontiers in Neuroscience, was conducted by researchers at Second Sight, the company that developed the device, called the Argus II, "the artificial retina", has already been mentioned in this blog in a post last April. As I said then, the concept is similar to the development of cochlear implants: there is a visual implant a grid of 60 electrodes attached to the retina to stimulate patterns directly on nerve cells. For this study, researchers stimulated six of these points on the grid to project braille letters.

Image: Copyright Gadget Review.

"There was no input except the electrode stimulation and the patient recognized the braille letters easily. This proves that the patient has good spatial resolution because he could easily distinguish between signals on different, individual electrodes." says Lauritzen.

The patient correctly identified 89 percent at one point, 80 percent in the case of two points, to 60 percent in the case of three words, and 70 percent of 4-letter words.

Source: 

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22525-implant-lets-the-blind-read-braille-with-their-eyes.html