Can a Camera Replace an Eye?

Gizmos and gadgetry imparting handicapped and impaired individuals with lost senses or new limbs isn't a new concept. Heck, it isn't even an old concept.

According to Wiki, the earliest record of a prosthetic traces back to Queen Vishpala in the Hindu holy books. After losing her leg in a battle, she is supplied with an iron one-by who else but gods?-so she can keep fighting. Though this tale of divine intervention is misleading from factual evidence, the anecdote proves that the idea of prosthetics was contemporary at the time. Other examples of wood or iron limbs exist in ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman texts.

Modern devices have given the deaf their first audible experiences, as recorded by a multitude of YouTube videos, such as this one. But advances for? blind people to recapture their eyesight have proved much more difficult, even if the concept has been considered since before Benjamin Franklin tried his hand at it. There are two underwhelming examples of a bionic eye. Arguably, the closest we've come to a bionic eye so far is a camera mounted to sunglasses with an accessories pack, which still only aids some of those who lost sight during their life. This is the only device that has been widely-approved. Perhaps the most intriguing of concepts belongs to Dr. Sawan of Polytechnique Montreal, who has developed an in-brain cortex implant which is wirelessly linked to an external camera and transceiver-but this visual prosthesis is at least a decade away.

So unfortunately, blind people are stuck with older technologies. The white cane increases the user's sense of touch, which aids in navigation. A guide dog can be thought of as a pilot, while the blind half of the guide-dog team can be thought of as a navigator. GPS devices are too imprecise to be used for everyday tasks. Echolocation can be quite effective, but takes such a significant amount of time and practice to become useful it's only effective for a very small minority.

However, there has never been a shortage of means to convey information to the blind. Braille was invented in 1824 by French-teenager Louis Braille, who lost his eyesight from a childhood accident. Braille varies by language and type, with Grade 1 braille spelling out every word, Grade 3 braille creating personal shorthands and acronyms, and Grade 2 braille somewhere in between, but also most common. Braille can even be used to display pictures and graphs, and has been incorporated into computers, tables, and other modern composition tools. A large variety of publishings have been made blind-friendly, including the Playboy at left.

But that soon may no longer be necessary, as a team of researchers at MIT have developed a ring which can pass over traditional type-faced books and read the words aloud. The user places the ring around his or her extended index finger and runs it along the lines of a page. An integrated camera feeds a processor, which reads the page for the person. Vibration sensors alert the user when the finger strays from a line or page. There is a tremendous need for this type of technology, as places such as restaurants, doctor's offices, or banks don't usually maintain a braille catalog.

Let's be honest, the FingerReader is not much more than a stopgap between braille and true visual prosthetics, and the development team plans to release it via smartphone apps as well. But until video cameras fit into eye sockets, this is perhaps one of the best alternatives available for the 11.2 million Americans who live with vision impairment.