The Argus II retinal implant allows letter, word reading in patients with blindessSecondSightEurope

"Without the glasses you can't see a thing, put the glasses on you can suddenly see. You get that wow factor every time you do it."

Philip Booth, 60, has had bionic eyes for the last three and a half years. He suffers from the degenerative condition retinitis pigmentosa (RP), an inheritable disease where the rods and cones in his retina slowly stop working. He first began losing his sight at age seven, and by the age of 30 he was completely blind. However, he can now see again -- thanks to the Argus II, an implant that gives him a new kind of sight.

Last month it was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for public use, and a paper published this month in the British Journal of Otphamology  has shown that the system can not only give people a basic form a sight back, but can also, in some cases, even help them read.

The Argus II has been undergoing trials since 2008, and in 2010  covered it on the eve of being approved in mainland European countries such as Germany and Italy. It works by taking over the role of generating electrical signals from the redundant retina, with an implant sending pulses down the optical nerve that the brain can learn to interpret as vision. It's nothing like vision we'd recognise, though -- instead, it's very abstract, often no more than pulses or flashes of light.

Booth is one of those who signed up to test the technology, having the operation to have it installed in March 2009. "It's not vision as I remember it. I can see flashes of light, if I focus on an object it'll appear as a flash of light to me," he told "I can identify that object and where it is. I can see where windows are, where doors are. I can see clothing, the difference between a white shirt and a black shirt if there's a contrast. I'm signed up for another 12 months and hopefully it'll be extended beyond that. I would tell anyone else who gets the chance to do this to do it."

While Booth hasn't been able to read with his implant, retinal surgeon and specialist Lyndon da Cruz told that 23 out of the 30 people tested "could read large letters, and four of them could read small letters, by which I mean three to five centimetres high, which for a totally blind person is an extraordinary phenomenon".

Da Cruz has been a part of the trials at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, one of several locations around the world where tests have been taking place to test the Argus II implants since 2008. They've found that "these devices are working for a long period of time and are very stable, up to four years on average with some people up to six years".

"[The Argus II] has two broad components," he explains. "There's the external component -- a pair of Oakley sunglasses with a tiny camera built into the bridge attached to a small computer. The camera picks up whatever you're looking at and the computer turns it into a pixelated picture and transmits that picture into a device in the eye. The device in the eye consists of a receiver and an electrode panel that stimulates the eye with the same pattern. The image is transmitted wirelessly. You put the sunglasses away and you look normal, nobody can see the device in the eye."

The transmitter has a range of perhaps one or two centimetres, and the system as a whole has a cost in the range of around $100,000 (£66,000), though da Cruz adds that with follow-up training and other clinics added on the cost is in the ballpark of between £80,000 and £100,000 (though that cost is being reduced as development continues). The surgery, which takes between two to five hours, isn't too complicated either. "The steps are within the capabilities of a reasonably well-practiced retinal surgeon," da Cruz said.

He continued: "We explain to patients that it won't be anything like the vision that they lost. It won't be some blurry or grainy version of what they had. The form they describe is the object being made up of light streaks or dots of light that are somewhere in space, because it's difficult, you don't have context. You see the objects, you see the light form a shape, sort of where you're looking at is where they are. You don't know how far away they are."

However, it's a system that only works with certain kinds of blindness. Da Cruz said: "It hasn't been trialled with other kinds of blindness, but that's not to say it can't be applied to them. You definitely need an optic nerve, so this excludes the huge number of people who are blind from glaucoma or from trauma severing the optic nerve, or from optic nerve disorders. That's one large group this device will never help, because there's no connection between the artifical retina and the brain."


  1. Hi,
    I am really glad this is finally happening. My mother has RP and this is finally available to help her.
    She had been in touch with Oxford, but the people were not happy there.
    This is awesome news.

    Mark Mettler
    Mar 19th 2013

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