- Title: MIDEAST: Israeli engineers design contact lens for the blind
- Date: 13th May 2014
- Summary: SHAPE CHANGING TO "X"
- Embargoed: 28th May 2014 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Jerusalem, Israel
- City:
- Country: Israel
- Topics: Technology
- Reuters ID: LVAD4GS22S29FG5WBOQ8HNTIX4FO
- Story Text: Contact lenses help the visually impaired see better, but a new kind of lens may soon assist those who can't see anything at all.
The innovative lens, according to its Israeli developers Professor Zeev Zalevsky from Bar Ilan University and Prof. Michael Belkin from Tel-ha-Shomer hospital, will actually be able to help blind people see - not via retinal photo receptors that other people use, but through tactile sensors found on the surface of the eye, the cornea. They will feel shapes being transmitted through the lens, similar to the way they can feel Braille writing with their fingers.
The technology is still two to three years from being commercialised, Zalevsky says, but his team has built an early-stage prototype. And the best part, he says, is that the technology is non-invasive and practical.
A tiny matrix of electrodes attached to the lens receives visual-spatial data transmitted wirelessly from a tiny camera built into a pair of glasses. The electrodes process the data and generate signals that stimulate nerves on the surface of the cornea, creating a sensation which is physically felt by the blind person. This tactile sensation, says Zalevsky, has the potential to operate as a vision substitute for blind people, who can be trained to associate the tactile feeling of the stimulation to real spatial shapes and thus improve their orientation capabilities.
"There is a camera that captures an image. The image is being processed by certain processor and then transmitted to a special contact lens which is positioned on top of the cornea of the blind person. The transmitted spatial information generates spatial stimulation over the surface of the cornea and this spatial tactile sensation, after proper training, can be recognised as the spatial shape that was imaged by the camera," Zalevsky told Reuters TV. He says the lens is as safe and painless to wear as a conventional contact lens.
Zalevsky is currently awaiting more funding to get approval for full clinical tests on the lens, which will allow him to determine that a person can detect and identify spatial shapes on the eye without actually seeing them. But a proof of concept demonstrating the basic function of the lens has been successful. It was achieved by using air pressure to stimulate the cornea instead of the lens' electric pulses.
Project manager Dr.Yevgeny Beiderman, who participated in those preliminary experiments, demonstrated them in the lab and accurately recognised tactile shapes he couldn't view. The air pipes connected to his eye through bulky glasses simply simulated the operation of the actual lens' electrodes, he said.
"Here we can see inside the goggles the matrix with the air pipes. We want to prove the concept of our device where we can distinguish between the position of these pipes on our eye. Later we will replace these pipes with the contact lens and electric circuits which will stimulate our eye instead of these pipes," Beiderman said.
Zalevsky and his colleagues say they are motivated by a desire to alleviate blindness, which they see as one of the most challenging tasks facing researchers today.
"In a sense what we are doing is similar to how they read braille writing with the tips of their fingers, but in our case it is like they take out their eye ball and reach it towards the object that is facing in front of the camera and feeling it with the cornea, with the surface of the eye," Zalevsky said.
While it's well known that the cornea is the most densely innervated of all body tissue and that it can produce tactile sensations, Zalevsky says his invention proves the cornea's capability to spatially differentiate between two points sensed over its surface.
"What we do is very unique because we were actually the first in the world to prove that there is spatial two points discrimination capability in the tactile sensation of the cornea. There are many sensors and this was proven before, but it has never been proven before that those sensors can also recognise or identify or discriminate between different spacial shapes of tactile stimulation over the cornea surface. And this we have been able to demonstrate on our preliminary proof of concept, in our preliminary clinical trials that we have performed in the laboratory," Zalevsky said.
He says the blind person can experience a normal sight range since the camera on his glasses turns to any direction with his head movements. He says that more cameras can be installed and cover even a wider range of field of view. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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