Giving blind people back their sight is a task of biblical proportions, right up there with walking on water and turning water into wine. Thanks to science, though, what we once imagined to be a miracle is now a simple surgical procedure. After decades of research, 2012 is the year that the bionic eye became a reality, and boy is it impressive.For now, the technology behind bionic vision is complex, but the results are reasonably rudimentary. Dianne Ashworth recently became the latest person to receive a new type of implant that enables people with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that causes blindness, to see again. The once-blind Australian woman can now see simple shapes and generally distinguish the difference between light and dark. One day, doctors hope that the technology will improve enough so that she’ll be able to recognize faces and possibly even read again. “All of a sudden I could see a little flash … it was amazing,” Ashworth said after her implant was switched on in June. “Every time there was stimulation there was a different shape that appeared in front of my eye.”The bionic eye works a lot like a regular eye. Normally, the light-sensitive retina picks up what’s in your field of view and translates it into electrical signals sent through the optic nerve to the brain which then processes the input and turns it into vision. In patients with retinal damage, the new implant, built by Bionic Vision Australia and based on technology developed by researchers at Stanford and Cornell, uses a light-sensitive electronic chip to do the heavy-lifting by stimulating the retina with its own electronic signals. A pair of British men got similar implants earlier this year after a Finnish man became the first patient to receive a chip back in 2010.Again, the bionic eye will just keep getting better and better as the technology improves. (I’m thinking it’ll kind of be like the difference between the graphics on the first Game Boy and the latest Nintendo 3DS.) What’s extra cool is that this technology isn’t just limited to the one sense. Known as neuromodulation, this burgeoning research has also been applied to ears in the form of cochlear implants, and now YouTube is filled with people hearing the sound of their own voice for the first time. There are also epidural implants that can help paraplegics regain their sense of touch and even walk again by stimulating the spinal cord. Then, of course, there’s the bionic nose that can sniff out cancer, though that one’s not really designed to be implanted in your head. Not yet, anyways.
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