Earlier this year I wrote about a fascinating new project run between Moorfields Eye Hospital and tech startup Second Sight. Patients were given implants to help them overcome a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa.
Each patient will be allocated a pair of glasses that come with a camera that will capture light and also send wireless signals to an implant located inside the retina. This implant will then communicate with the brain, and help the patients to regain their sight.
Further evidence of progress in this area comes from fellow startup eSight Corporation, a leader in the development of electronic glasses to help people see. They’ve recently released a new version of their product, called eSight 3.
The company, which was founded in 2006, claims to offer people who are legally blind the ability to see just as sighted people can, thus dramatically improving their quality of life.
“eSight 3 is a game-changer for the legally blind. My entire career has been spent engineering sight-enabling technologies, so I can say with some authority that eSight’s world-class lab is the largest and best engineering team, anywhere in the world, that specializes exclusively in developing medical devices that allow the legally blind to actually see and be mobile,” the company say.
How the tech works
The device features a high-speed and high-definition camera that is capable of capturing everything the user is currently looking at. The AI built into the device then tidies up the video feed and displays it on two OLED screens in front of the user’s eyes.
This bit is crucial, as legal blindness is a subset of vision impairment that renders the individual’s vision impaired in such ways as lacking depth perception or containing sizeable blind spots. The medical definition is central visual acuity of 20/200 or less and/or a visual field of 20 degrees or less. This compares to healthy vision, which is 20/20.
So the video tool helps to fill in the blanks in the impaired vision of the user. The Bioptic Tilt capability of the device aims to adjust automatically to the precise position of the head to help the user with their peripheral vision and therefore help them with things like balance and nausea prevention.
When users have tested the device, it’s taken sight that was 20/200 and improved it into the region of 20/25.
It’s estimated that there are 300 million legally blind people around the world and whilst the $9,995 price tag may make it prohibitively expensive for many, it nonetheless promises to make a substantial difference. Check out the video below to see the device in action.
