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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
The Boston Retinal Implant Project
The Boston Retinal Implant Project is an attempt to create a microelectronic retinal implant. Their goal is to restore vision to patients with age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. They are currently testing their first device, which stimulates the neurons underneath the retina based on visual information acquired by a tiny camera and relayed to the implant using radio waves. The electrode array which interfaces with the neurons is not capable of transmitting much information yet -- there are only 15 electrodes. They clearly have a lot of work ahead of them. But it's a very exciting start.
My question is, how long until I can have one of these things? If someone's going to insert one of these in my eye, I want more than fifteen pixels, that's for sure. My own back-of-the-envelope guess is that prostheses like these will be as good as my own eye in anywhere from 20 to 30 years. Something to look forward to.
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The Boston Retinal Implant Project is an attempt to create a microelectronic retinal implant. Their goal is to restore vision to patients with age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. They are currently testing their first device, which stimulates the neurons underneath the retina based on visual information acquired by a tiny camera and relayed to the implant using radio waves. The electrode array which interfaces with the neurons is not capable of transmitting much information yet -- there are only 15 electrodes. They clearly have a lot of work ahead of them. But it's a very exciting start.
My question is, how long until I can have one of these things? If someone's going to insert one of these in my eye, I want more than fifteen pixels, that's for sure. My own back-of-the-envelope guess is that prostheses like these will be as good as my own eye in anywhere from 20 to 30 years. Something to look forward to.