The laser-powered bionic eye that gives 576-pixel grayscale vision to the blind | KurzweilAI
(Credit: Nano Retina)
Bionic eye implants are finally hitting the market — first in Europe, and hopefully soon in the U.S., ExtremeTech reports.
These implants can restore sight to completely blind patients — though only if the blindness is caused by a faulty retina, as in macular degeneration.
Second Sight
The first of these implants, Argus II, developed by Second Sight, is already available in Europe. For around $115,000, you get a 4-hour operation to install an antenna behind your eye, and a special pair of camera-equipped glasses that send signals to the antenna.
The antenna is wired into your retina with around 60 electrodes, creating the equivalent of a 60-pixel display for your brain to interpret. The first users of the Argus II bionic eye report that they can see rough shapes and track the movement of objects, and slowly read large writing.
Bio-Retina: 576 pixels
Rather than bringing people into the lab, researchers at MIT are putting tiny labs into people via a tiny implantable capsule that can track the growth of a tumor or detect heart-deterioration or even silent heart attacks from inside the body. The miniature lab is small enough to implant via a needle during a normal biopsy, and can remain inside the body vigilantly watching for increased tumor growth. The inside of the device is filled with nanoparticles, each sporting an antibody specially designed to bind to specific molecules like those that are produced by certain kinds of tumors or by damaged heart muscle cells.
via joshbyard:
Computer Chip Implant to Program Brain Activity, Treat Parkinson’s | Singularity Hub
An international team of researchers led by Dr. Matti Mintz at the University of Tel Aviv is working on a biomimetic computer chip for brain stimulation that is programmable, responsive to neural activity, and capable of bridging broken connections in the brain. Called the Rehabilitation Nano Chip, or ReNaChip, the device could be used to replace diseased or damaged brain tissue, restore brain functions lost to aging, and even treat epilepsy. The chip is currently in animal testing, but should reach human applications within a few years.
MIT engineers have been working on a mathematical model that can be used to map out the patterns of turbulence formed by drug eluting stents. With this knowledge it is possible to predict which designs will be less favorable to the formation of stent induced clots, and so let engineers work around potentially bad shapes (via Model Helps Develop Better Cardiac Stent Designs - Medgadget )
Electronic Vision via Artificial Retina
Second Sight Medical Products has developed Argus Two, a sophisticated eye-implant device for the blind with an array of 60 electrodes, providing a much sharper image to its users than its earlier device, Argus One, with 16 electrodes, creating a 4 by 4 pattern of light and dark spots. Argus Two consists of a tiny camera mounted on a pair of dark glasses and a hip-mounted microprocessor, produced for the U.S. Energy Department’s Artificial Retina Project.
Electrospinning is a process that uses an electrical charge to turn polymers into extremely thin fibres that are ‘spun’ to form a mat of fine fibres … In this case, nanosized hair- like structures, a thousand times thinner than the width of a human hair, are electrospun at MNTC and added to the surface of an orthopaedic implant to create a ‘living interface’ between the artificial implants and living bone. Not only does this improve the performance of the implants it also significantly increases their durability to last the lifetime of the patient. (via ‘Intelligent’ Materials To Revolutionize Surgical Implants)
