91av

HE CAN read large letters at a distance, walk around objects without bumping
into them and even surf the Net. Not so remarkable—until you realise the
62-year-old is blind. His abilities come from a pair of electronic glasses and a
brain implant inserted 23 years ago.

Using retinal implants, some patients have been able to see images generated by computers
(91av, 7 November 1998, p 23),
but “Jerry” is thought to be the first blind person to “see” the world in real time. His vision
system, developed over 30 years at the Dobelle Institute in New York, takes
images from a tiny camera and range finder mounted on a pair of spectacles and
feeds them directly into the visual cortex of his brain via 68 platinum
electrodes.

According to founder Richard Dobelle, the visual prosthesis could be on the
market later this year. Jerry had the electrodes implanted in 1978,
when he volunteered for early artificial vision experiments after losing his
sight at 36. Now he can walk up to a cap hanging on a wall, pick it up and place
it on a mannequin. He can also count fingers held up in front of him, read
6-centrimetre tall letters from five feet away and, by plugging into a radio
interface, he can link to other devices such as a TV or computer. It’s all made
possible by the imaging computer he wears on his waist, which transforms
information from the spectacles into pulses that the brain can interpret as
crude images.

Kevin Warwick, a cyberneticist at Reading University, is impressed with the
technology. “It’s going to change what it means to be human,” he says of the
link to the computer—but he warns that it could one day be possible to
hack into someone’s brain and corrupt what they’re sensing.