Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Eyeball-implanted camera


A lot of efforts were made to help blind people restore their sight. Yet, despite the fact that many promising ideas appeared it's very hard to find a solution for such a complex problem. But in case we really want to make all those people happy the research on this issue must go on.

Thus, according to the recent patent application implanting a micro-camera directly into the eyeball may be a future solution for restoring sight to blind or people with damaged vision. Actually technology to restore sight to the blind by using electronic retinas was developed some time ago, but the link between the retina and external cameras was involving wires, which represents a significant disadvantage of such a method. But now it's said that the camera could be charged wirelessly and communicate directly with a chip implanted at the back of the eye, so very little external hardware would be needed.

UCLA Optical engineer Michelle Hauer thinks that technology may have advanced enough to insert a tiny camera inside the lens of the eye, capable of adapting for corneal optical effects and perhaps using haptics to stabilize its position. The camera would transmit images to a nerve-stimulating chip at the back of the eye, resulting in a complete electronic vision system.

It sounds great, so if scientists are able to make this technology true in near future, it will be an outstanding achievement. However, it seems a little bit unreal to implement such a perfect technology.

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