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## Artificial Eye Produces Vision

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    PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
    January 17, 2000

    With camera wired to brain, blind man 'sees' objects.
    Artificial eye produces vision

    By Malcolm Ritter
    ASSOCIATED PRESS

    NEW YORK - A blind man can read large letters and navigate
    around big objects by using a tiny camera wired directly to
    his brain, the first artificial eye to provide useful vision,
    a researcher reports.

    The 62-year-old man does not see an image. He perceives up to
    100 specks of light that appear and disappear, like stars that
    come and go behind passing clouds, as his field of vision
    shifts.

    But as he showed a reporter last week, that is enough to let
    him find a mannequin in a room, walk to a black stocking cap
    hanging on a white wall, and then return to the mannequin to
    plop the cap on its head. He also can recognize a 2-inch-tall
    letter from five feet away, said researcher William Dobelle.

    "He can do remarkably well" with the limited visual signal,
    said Dobelle, who is developing the artificial vision system.

    The man, who asked to be identified only as Jerry, has been
    blind since the age of 36. He volunteered for the study and
    got the brain implant in 1978; scientists have been working
    since then to improve the software.

    Dobelle is chairman of the Dobelle Institute, a medical device
    company in New York. He describes the device and its
    performance in this month's issue of the ASAIO Journal, a
    publication of the American Society of Artificial Internal
    Organs.

    Richard Normann, who studies artificial vision at the
    University of Utah, said he was encouraged by how much Jerry
    could do. He said Dobelle's report suggested that, someday,
    even limited signals to the brain will let blind people do
    relatively complicated visual tasks.

    It's the first demonstration of useful artificial vision, he
    said, but he stressed the device was "a very limited
    navigational aid, and it's a far cry from the visual
    experience that normal people enjoy."

    To use the device, Jerry wears sunglasses with a tiny pinhole
    camera mounted on one lens and an ultrasonic range finder on
    the other. Both devices communicate with a small computer
    carried on his hip, which highlights the edges between light
    and dark areas in the camera image. It then tells an adjacent
    computer to send appropriate signals to an array of small
    electrodes on the surface of Jerry's brain, through wires
    entering his skull behind his right ear.

    The electrodes stimulate certain brain cells, making Jerry
    perceive the specks of light. The shifting patterns as Jerry
    scans across a scene tells him where light areas meet dark
    ones, letting him find the black cap on the white wall, for
    example.

    The device provides a sort of tunnel vision, reading an area
    about the size of a card 2 inches wide and 8 inches tall, held
    at arm's length.

    Jerry uses the device only two or three days a week at
    Dobelle's lab, as researchers tinker with it. One question is
    how best to provide depth perception, using signals from the
    range finder. During the demonstration, Jerry had to walk
    cautiously as he approached the mannequin and the wall,
    holding an arm out to prevent collisions.

    Dobelle said an improved version of the device should go on
    sale overseas, in limited numbers, this year. He said
    yesterday that it was not yet clear when it might be available
    in the United States.

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