A prosthesis to restore vision in the blind
The public summary consists of 250 to max. 300 words. The summary is intended for a broad audience with a secondary education language level. In short, the public summary describes the who, what, where, when, why and how of the project. Focus on the core message of the project instead of elaborating on explanations and background information.
The project POSITIONED is a collaboration between the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and the company Phosphoenix aiming to develop a new probe that can be inserted in the brain to restore a rudimentary form of vision for blind people. The new technology will thereby connect a camera to the visual brain of the blind user, bypassing the malfunctioning eyes. The approach may provide a solution for a large fraction of the people who are blind, a condition that affects more than 40 million people across the world. More than half of them cannot benefit from treatments of the eye because the connections between eye and brain degenerated. These patients can therefore only benefit from a visual brain prosthesis, which would increase their independence by allowing them to engage in activities for which they now rely on caregivers. POSITIONED will develop a probe to stimulate brain cells electrically, creating a brain interface that enables artificial perception in the entire visual field and that can work for many years, something that has not been achieved with previous approaches. The future user will wear a camera, and the video stream is processed to give rise to the artificial perceptions outlining the relevant objects in the user’s vicinity. POSITIONED will test the new probe in mice to assess its functionality, how well it integrates with the brain tissue and how long it keeps working, as in important step towards validation in the clinic. At the end of the project, the researchers will have gained important new insights into the response of the brain to the new probe and how well the electrical activation of brain cells leads to visual perception.
