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AI-Powered Artificial Vision for Visual Prostheses

Enrolling By InvitationNA

Sponsor: University of California, Santa Barbara

Conditions: Blindness, Acquired

Interventions: Visual prosthesis

Countries: United States, Spain

Visual impairment is one of the ten most prevalent causes of disability and poses extraordinary challenges to individuals in our society that relies heavily on sight. Living with acquired blindness not only lowers the quality of life of these individuals, but also strains society's limited resources for assistance, care and rehabilitation. However, to date, there is no effective treatment for man patients who are visually handicapped as a result of degeneration or damage to the inner layers of the retina, the optic nerve or the visual pathways. Therefore, there are compelling reasons to pursue the development of a cortical visual prosthesis capable of restoring some useful sight in these profoundly blind patients. However, the quality of current prosthetic vision is still rudimentary. A major outstanding challenge is translating electrode stimulation into a code that the brain can understand. Interactions between the device electronics and the retinal neurophysiology lead to distortions that can severely limit the quality of the generated visual experience. Rather than aiming to one day restore natural vision (which may remain elusive until the neural code of vision is fully understood), one might be better off thinking about how to create practical and useful artificial vision now. The goal of this work is to address fundamental questions that will allow the development of a Smart Bionic Eye, a device that relies on AI-powered scene understanding to augment the visual scene (similar to the Microsoft HoloLens), tailored to specific real-world tasks that are known to diminish the quality of life of people who are blind (e.g., face recognition, outdoor navigation, reading, self-care).

Eligibility overview

Sex: ALL

Age: 18 Years to —

Healthy volunteers: Yes

Study type: INTERVENTIONAL

Eligibility criteria

Criteria for inclusion of visual prosthesis users:

* Subject must be at least 18 years of age;
* Subject has been implanted with a visual prosthesis (e.g., Argus II, Orion, Cortivis)
* Subject has healed from surgery and the surgeon has cleared the subject for programming;
* Subject has the cognitive and communication ability to participate in the study (i.e., follow spoken directions, perform tests, and give feedback);
* Subject is willing to conduct psychophysics testing up to 4-6 hours per day of testing on 3-5 consecutive days;
* Subject is capable of understanding patient information materials and giving written informed consent;
* Subject is able to walk unassisted.

Criteria for inclusion of sighted control subjects:

* Subject speaks English;
* Subject must be at least 18 years of age;
* Subject has visual acuity of 20/40 or better (corrected);
* Subject has the cognitive and communication ability to participate in the study (i.e., follow spoken directions, perform tests, and give feedback);
* Subject is capable of understanding participant information materials and giving written informed consent.
* Subject is able to walk unassisted

Exclusion criteria:

* Visual prosthesis users: Subject is unwilling or unable to travel to testing facility for at least 3 days of testing within a one-week timeframe;
* Sighted controls: Subject has a history of motion sickness or flicker vertigo
* All: Subject has language or hearing impairment

Locations (2)

Santa Barbara, California, United States
Elche, Alicante, Spain