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| Bionic ears, and now an eye | Jul 22, 2015 3:35 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Bionic eye implant world first (BBC) describes a recent medical procedure in Manchester that's restored some central vision to an 80-year-old patient with macular degeneration: "The bionic eye implant receives its visual information from a miniature camera mounted on glasses worn by the patient. The images are converted into electrical pulses and transmitted wirelessly to an array of electrodes attached to the retina. The electrodes stimulate the remaining retina's remaining cells which send the information to the brain." The impression given is more like a rough pattern on a grid of white dots than an actual real-world view, but it is enough to show, for instance, the outline of a doorway.
Speaking of bionic sensors, I recently met someone with a cochlear implant, which I guess you could call a type of bionic ear—an implanted microphone that can translate sound waves into electrical impulses the brain decodes as sound, which can give hearing to people whose hearing has been significantly impaired due to damage to their cochlea, a part of the inner ear. The implant has some advantages over normal ears, even! If she wants to hear someone clearly in a noisy restaurant, for instance, she can place a tiny remote microphone close to them to boost the implant's reception of just that person's conversation. And it automatically screens out noises that would be painful to flesh-and-blood ears. I first wrote a blog entry about Cochlear implants back in June 2011 (that entry is much more extensive, with multimedia too!), noting at the time that over 150,000 people had them; currently, Wikipedia says that as of December 2012—just 17 months later—about 324,000 people had them; so by now, two and a half years later...well I guess we could very well be up to half a million bionic ears worldwide!
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