American medical company, ‘Second Sight’ manufacture implantable visual prosthetics to provide vision to people that suffer from a variety of different visual impairments. Their most advanced piece of technology so far is ‘The Argus® II Retinal Prosthesis System’ that can restore some functional vision for people suffering from blindness. Although a very successful product, it only provides a limited about of restored vision to the patient, so the company have been working on it’s successor, ‘The Orion’.
The Argus® II Retinal Prosthesis System
The Orion™ Cortical Visual Prosthesis System
The idea behind The Orion is to convert images captured by a small video camera mounted on a pair of glasses that the patient wears daily, these images are then converted into a series of small electrical impulses.
The Orion would then wirelessly transmit these pulses to an array of electrodes that have been implanted into the patient. The electrodes bypass the retina and optic nerve to directly stimulate the visual cortex. This is the area of the brain that processes visual data, effectively allowing a person to see.
This technology has the potential to essential “cure” all forms of blindness including glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and forms of cancer and trauma. The Argus II had been approved for use in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the U.S., so you can expect to see The Orion in the same, if not more countries.
Second Sight’s Argus II Restores Vision to Blind Patient
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