If you find yourself in central London this week with a spare hour or two, drop into the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition 2011, it’s on until the 10th of July, and there you will see an amazing exhibit about how scientists are using the latest technology to create “artificial sight” to help blind and partially-sighted people.

Thanks to a volume consumer market, the technology behind today’s smart gadgets is cheaply available. Mobile phones and computer games consoles now carry sophisticated position detectors, video cameras, face recognition and tracking software, you name it.

And researchers have been looking for new ways to exploit this in other fields like medicine.

One example is an exhibit that is drawing a lot of attention: a pair of Clark Kent style glasses with a difference.

Researchers at Oxford University are developing the “bionic glasses” to help partially-sighted people who have just a small area of vision, or whose vision is blurred or cloudy, or who can’t process detailed images, such as they can see that a hand is front of them but they can’t make out the fingers. A good example would be someone with age-related macular degeneration or diabetic retinopathy.

Dr Stephen Hicks of Oxford University’s Department of Clinical Neurology said in a media statement:

“We want to be able to enhance vision in those who’ve lost it or who have little left or almost none.”

“The glasses should allow people to be more independent – finding their own directions and signposts, and spotting warning signals,” he explained.

The glasses have video cameras at the corners and arrays of tiny lights embedded in the see-through lenses. The camera collects images and feeds them to a smartphone-type computer in the wearer’s pocket which has software that can locate objects or people, and track their position. A feedback mechanism drives the colours and intensities of the lights in the lenses in real time, so the wearer can “see” what is happening in their surroundings well enough to navigate around a room, and pick out relevant objects.

For example, different colours could be used to convey different types of information, such as to help distinguish between objects and people, while brightness could be used to show how far away they are.

The appearance of the glasses is important. They must look “discrete”, says Hicks, they have to “allow eye contact between people and present a simplified image to people with poor vision, to help them maintain independence in life”.

The see-through “lenses” of the glasses, which are really a display with holes in, allow people to see the eyes of the wearer.

Eye contact is important in social relationships: the researchers have put a high priority on incorporating these principes in their design, so the glasses are acceptable for people to wear in public.

Hicks says they may even be able to develop a way for the glasses to “read” the headlines of newspapers, using optical character recognition, and feeding the words back to the wearer via earphones. Another addition could be to incorporate barcode readers so the wearer can “see” price tags on shop items, for example.

The glasses could be very cost-effective, especially compared to the cost of a guide dog. Hicks said the bionic glasses could probably one day cost around £500, whereas it costs more than £25,000 to train a guide dog.

At the exhibit stand visitors get a chance to try on the glasses and see how good they are at navigating with them.

The bionic glasses are at the prototype stage. Hicks and his team have some funding from the National Institute of Health Research to carry out a one-year feasibility study and run a trial with people using the glasses in their own homes.

The Exhibition is showing a total of 20 examples of the latest UK science that is changing the world, and giving the public a chance to speak to the scientists involved.

And by the way, entry is free.

http://royalsociety.org/summer-science/2011/

Sources : University of Oxford, Royal Society.

Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD