Seeing through bionic eyes

Indoor Navigation System for Blind

ScienceDaily (May 18, 2012) — University of Nevada, Reno computer science engineering team Kostas Bekris and Eelke Folmer presented their indoor navigation system for people with visual impairments at two national conferences in the past two weeks. The researchers explained how a combination of human-computer interaction and motion-planning research was used to build a low-cost accessible navigation system, called Navatar, which can run on a standard smartphone.

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Watch this paralyzed woman control a robotic arm using only her mind

Watch this video, and witness a breakthrough in the field of brain-machine interfaces. Researchers have been improving upon BrainGate — a brain-machine interface that allows users to control an external device with their minds — for years, but what you see here is the most advanced incarnation of the implant system to date. It is nothing short of remarkable.

Starting at around 3:10, you can watch Cathy Hutchinson — who has been paralyzed from the neck down for 15 years — drink her morning coffee by controlling a robotic arm using only her mind. According to research published in today's issue of Nature, Hutchinson is one of two quadriplegic patients — both of them stroke victims — who have learned to control the device by means of the BrainGate neural implant. The New York Times reports that it's the first published demonstration that humans with severe brain injuries can control a sophisticated prosthetic arm with such a system.

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Paralyzed Man Regains Hand Function after Breakthrough Nerve Rewiring Procedure

A 71-year-old man who became paralyzed from the waist down and lost all use of both hands in a 2008 car accident has regained motor function in his fingers after doctors rewired his nerves to bypass the damaged ones in a pioneering surgical procedure, according to a case study published on Tuesday.

While the man still had limited arm, elbow and shoulder movement, because he had crushed his spinal cord at the C7 vertebrae located at the base of his neck, the nerve circuits responsible for sending singles from the brain to the muscles in his hands became severed, which resulted in loss of movement in both his hands.

However, because the nearby nerves had not been injured in the accident, surgeons were able to cut an undamaged nerve in the man’s elbow and connect it to the damaged nerve which activates muscles in the hand responsible for grasping objects.

"The circuit [in the hand] is intact, but no longer connected to the brain,” Surgeon Ida Fox, an assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Washington University, explained to the BBC. "What we do is take that circuit and restore the connection to the brain."

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Artificial retinas give blind patients ability to see light and shapes

By George Dvorsky

Two British men who were completely blind for years have regained some of their vision, after undergoing surgery to fit eye implants, according to the BBC.

This pioneering treatment is at an early stage of development, but it marks an important step forward in an effort to help those who have lost their sight from a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa.

The breakthrough was part of a clinical trial carried out at the Oxford Eye Hospital and King's College Hospital in London by Robert MacLaren and and Tim Jackson. Their work focuses on a previously untreatable condition known as retinitis pigmentosa (RP) - a type of inherited progressive retinal dystrophy in which abnormalities of the photoreceptors (rods and cones) or the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) of the retina lead to progressive visual loss. The condition happens when the photoreceptor cells at the back of the eye gradually cease to function. MORE HERE >>>