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...The device, known as the Argus II, is made by a California company called Second Sight. It was recently approved for use in Europe, and in the United States it has given a handful of test patients like Konstantopoulos cause for optimism.
"Without the system, I can't see anything. With the system, it's some kind of hope. Something is there," he said.
"Later on, who knows with technology what it can do? Everything comes little by little."
The device is similar to the cochlear implants that have allowed hundreds of thousands of deaf people to hear again, and is part of a growing field known as neuromodulation, or the science that helps people regain lost abilities such as sight, hearing and movement by stimulating the brain, spinal cord or nerves.
Ear implants work by picking up sound through a tiny microphone, then converting those signals into electrical impulses and sending them to an electrode array implanted in the patient. The electrodes gather the impulses and ship them to the auditory nerve, which hears them as sounds.
The retinal prosthesis follows a similar process. A tiny video camera on the glasses captures images and converts them into electrical signals that are fed to an electrode array that is surgically implanted in the patient's eye.
The visual signals are sent to the optic nerve and then to the brain, and the patient sees them as flashes of light and blurry shapes...[Full article]
