About 1.3 million Americans are legally blind, most of them affected by late onset diseases such as glaucoma and age related macular degeneration. To help the blind, a cortical visual prosthesis can be life-changing, partially restoring sight, improving mobility, and even helping to recognize some objects.
Second Sight Medical Products (Second Sight) https://www.secondsight.com develops, manufactures, and markets implantable visual prosthetics to create an artificial form of useful vision to help blind individuals. On October 2019, Second Sight received a $2.4 million four year grant supported by the National Eye Institute within NIH, https://nei.nih.gov, to develop “Simultaneous Localization and Mapping” (SLAM) technologies.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), a not-for-profit of JHU, https://www.jhuapl.edu are addressing recent advances in computer vision. These advances include recent developments in object recognition, depth sensing, and SLAM technologies. Second Sight’s joint collaboration with APL will work to speed the integration of SLAM into the next generation of the company’s Orion® Cortical Visual Prosthesis System (Orion).
Orion is an implanted cortical stimulation device intended to provide useful artificial vision to individuals that are blind due to a wide range of causes. Orion is able to convert images captured by a miniature video camera mounted on glasses into a series of small electrical pulses.
The device is designed to bypass diseased or injured eye anatomy and transmit electrical pulses wirelessly to an array of electrodes implanted on the surface of the brain’s visual cortex where the perception of patterns of light will be provided.
The APL team is not only collaborating with Second Sight but is also working with Roberta Klatzky PhD., a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University https://www.cmu.edu. She explained, “As sighted people walk, they keep track of where objects can be found. The mental map of the nearby environment comes from the flow of objects across the field of view, stereo depth perception, and other visual cues.”
People without vision must acquire this knowledge from other sources. The use of Orion will help individuals orient and navigate obstacles in their surroundings. The goal is to give Orion users the ability to localize objects and navigate salient landmarks in unfamiliar surroundings in real time. APL will take the lead to develop the SLAM technology while Second Sight will be responsible for the integration and subsequent clinical deployment.
An early feasibility study of Orion is underway at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center https://www.uclahealth.org in Los Angeles and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston https://www.bcm.edu. The company anticipates negotiating the clinical and regulatory pathway to commercialization with FDA as part of FDA’s Breakthrough Devices Program.
Go to https://fda.gov/medical-devices/how-to-study-and-market-your-devices/breakthrough-devices-program#s1 for more information on FDA’s “Breakthrough Devices Program”.