University of California, Santa Barbara
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).
The investigators will perform basic experimental studies involving humans (BESH) designed to quantify the perceptual experiences of visual prosthesis patients. These experiments will follow standard procedures for collecting behavioral data, and involve simple perceptual tasks (e.g., signal detection, object recognition) and behavioral tasks (e.g., walking towards a goal location). The investigators will produce visual percepts in visual prosthesis patients either by directly stimulating electrodes (using standard, safe pulse trains), or by asking them to view a computer or projector screen…
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 mat…
In response to the stimulation/image on the monitor, subjects will be asked to either make a perceptual judgment or perform a simple behavioral task. Examples include detecting a stimulus ('did you see a light on that trial'), reporting size by drawing on a touch screen, or walking to a target location. Both patient response and reaction time will be recorded. In some cases, the investigators will also collect data measuring subjects' eye position. This is a noninvasive procedure that will be carried out using standard eye-tracking equipment via an infra-red camera that tracks the position of the subjects' pupil. Only measurements like eye position or eye blinks will be recorded, so these data do not contain identifiable information.