Lasers & photonics


Artificial retinas can restore partial vision to people who have lost their sight due to degenerative diseases, where their photoreceptors can no longer function normally. Presently, only limited solutions are available that provide marginal improvements to sight – but new ones are under development that promise better results. Monica Karpinski finds out what’s on the horizon.


hen the world’s first artificial retina, Argus II, was approved for use in the early 2010s, it marked a huge


Sight for sore eyes W


technological breakthrough. It provided a way to bypass photoreceptors that had been damaged by disease: in a healthy eye, these cells sense light and convert it into signals that are passed to the brain. Instead, the Argus II captured an image using a camera mounted on a pair of glasses. This information was then transmitted wirelessly to a


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chip implanted within the retina, where it was converted into electrical signals that ultimately reached the brain. Yet the improvements to vision it offered were modest – broadly, patients could distinguish simple shapes such as horizontal lines and sometimes large-print letters – and the device has since been phased out.


A handful of other solutions available today follow the same rationale: solid chips are implanted into the retina that receive information about an


Medical Device Developments / www.medicaldevice-developments.com


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