A Bionic Eye Could Give Us Super-sight
Researchers from the University of Minnesota announced that they managed to build a prototype of a bionic eye. That could one day not only help blind people but also bring “supersight” to people who see normally.
By intographics CC0 Creative Commons via Pixabay.com
The experts used their own 3D printer and first, they printed a base of silver particles onto the inner side of a glass hemisphere. On the tip of this silver base, they printed photodiodes – devices capable of transforming light to electric signals. The whole process takes about an hour and when they were done with it they had a bionic eye capable of transforming light to electricity with about a 25 % effectiveness.
As you might expect there are still some problems that need to be solved. One of them is that such an eye couldn’t really be implanted to a human recipient. We will have to find a way to print on a soft material that would replace the glass hemisphere. The experts also want to increase the number of photoreceptors to increase the effectiveness of the bionic eye.
And lastly, we will also need to make the electric signals understandable for our brains – which might take a while. But once the scientists succeed maybe we could be on the verge of a new age where each of us has superhuman eye-sight.
Sources:
- https://futurism.com/bionic-eye-prototype/
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.201803980
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