MIT scientists have devices an interesting way to help those who are blind regain some measure of vision.  They have come up with a means of fitting a computer chip onto the end of the optical nerve at the retina which can send electrical signals when the eye can’t, all without any real need for an actual eyeball.  The “microfabricated polyimide stimulating electrode array with sputtered iridium oxide electrodes” with “secondary power and data receiving coils” is surgically implanted in the retina, and then fed signals through induction, meaning that the power is provided by the electromagnetic signals that carry the data.  All with no direct wires to the chip.

The MIT Retinal Implant

This then allows for cameras or whatever vision devices are to be used to be built into something like the visor that Geordi LaForge wore in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Blind Geordi LaForge And His Infamous Visor

Okay, so a lot of the finer points still have to be worked out.  So far the MIT research has only been done on Yucatan miniature pigs.  Three of them have been chipped for several months now.  The pigs, however, are far from ideal at communicating just how well they can see.  The scientists have tried fitting them up with electronics-laden contact lenses in the hopes of determining the effects of the retina-chip, but it can only give them so much information compared to humans with words.

To that end a human version of the retinal implant has been designed, and the MIT researchers hope to begin human trials within three years.  Once the more communicative species of homo sapiens is chipped-up, MIT researchers are sure that they’ll be better able to refine the algorithms that are driving the stimulator array, turning it into a much more useful device.  They’re a pessemistic lot though, wary of promising true vision just yet.  But as Shawn Kelly of MIT’s Research Laboratory for Electronics says, “Anything that could help the blind see a little better and let them identify objects and move around a room would be an enormous help.“