Artificial Sight On View In London

If you find yourself in central London this week with a spare hour or two, drop into the Royal Society's Summer Science
Exhibition 2011, it's on until the 10th of July, and there you will see an amazing exhibit about how scientists are using the latest
technology to create "artificial sight" to help blind and partially-sighted people.


Thanks to a volume consumer market, the technology behind today's smart gadgets is cheaply available. Mobile phones and
computer games consoles now carry sophisticated position detectors, video cameras, face recognition and tracking software, you
name it.


And researchers have been looking for new ways to exploit this in other fields like medicine.


One example is an exhibit that is drawing a lot of attention: a pair of Clark Kent style glasses with a difference.


Researchers at Oxford University are developing the "bionic glasses" to help partially-sighted people who have just a small area
of vision, or whose vision is blurred or cloudy, or who can't process detailed images, such as they can see that a hand is front of
them but they can't make out the fingers. A good example would be someone with age-related macular degeneration or diabetic
retinopathy.


Dr Stephen Hicks of Oxford University's Department of Clinical Neurology said in a media statement:


"We want to be able to enhance vision in those who've lost it or who have little left or almost none."


"The glasses should allow people to be more independent - finding their own directions and signposts, and spotting warning
signals," he explained.


The glasses have video cameras at the corners and arrays of tiny lights embedded in the see-through lenses. The camera collects
images and feeds them to a smartphone-type computer in the wearer's pocket which has software that can locate objects or
people, and track their position. A feedback mechanism drives the colours and intensities of the lights in the lenses in real time,
so the wearer can "see" what is happening in their surroundings well enough to navigate around a room, and pick out relevant
objects.


For example, different colours could be used to convey different types of information, such as to help distinguish between objects
and people, while brightness could be used to show how far away they are.


The appearance of the glasses is important. They must look "discrete", says Hicks, they have to "allow eye contact between
people and present a simplified image to people with poor vision, to help them maintain independence in life".


The see-through "lenses" of the glasses, which are really a display with holes in, allow people to see the eyes of the wearer.



Eye contact is important in social relationships: the researchers have put a high priority on incorporating these principes in
their design, so the glasses are acceptable for people to wear in public.


Hicks says they may even be able to develop a way for the glasses to "read" the headlines of newspapers, using optical character
recognition, and feeding the words back to the wearer via earphones. Another addition could be to incorporate barcode readers
so the wearer can "see" price tags on shop items, for example.


The glasses could be very cost-effective, especially compared to the cost of a guide dog. Hicks said the bionic glasses could
probably one day cost around ВЈ500, whereas it costs more than ВЈ25,000 to train a guide dog.


At the exhibit stand visitors get a chance to try on the glasses and see how good they are at navigating with them.


The bionic glasses are at the prototype stage. Hicks and his team have some funding from the National Institute of Health
Research to carry out a one-year feasibility study and run a trial with people using the glasses in their own homes.


The Exhibition is showing a total of 20 examples of the latest UK science that is changing the world, and giving the public a
chance to speak to the scientists involved.


And by the way, entry is free.


royalsociety/summer-science/2011/


Sources : University of Oxford, Royal Society.


: Catharine Paddock, PhD






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