Continued Study of Artificial Vision: Evaluation of the BrainPort® System and Investigation of Visual Ambulation

The prevalence of blindness in the US adult population is 0.8% and ranges from about 3/10000 to 15/10000 in children. Data from world health organization show that about 500,000 children become blind each year. The annual cost of blindness to the federal government is $4 billion and the cost of a lifetime of support and unpaid taxes for a blind person is about $1 million.

There is a need to restore vision for blind patients. Research on vision restoration develops fast. There are multiple types of approaches toward producing useful artificial vision. One of them directly sends images from a video camera to the visual cortex via an electrode array that is intracranially placed on the visual cortex of blind patients. Another one surgically places an electrode array beneath the retina for patients whose optic nerves are still healthy. Both of them require major surgery and have high risks, and neither is available for routine clinical application.

The one that is non-invasive and easy to use is called the BrainPort® system. The BrainPort® system is manufactured by Wicab, Inc. It is commercially available and affordable to any consumer. This system is a novel, bionic, non-invasive, vision bypass system that conveys environment images from a spectacle-frame-mounted video-camera to the brain via an electro-tactile tongue array. The electro-tactile stimulation delivered by the tongue-array placed on the tongue allows users to interpret the images of objects in their camera's visual field.

Inclusion criteria

• Less than 25 years of age and be able to cooperate for full study protocol
• Have a clinical diagnosis of blindness (light perception or worse), or 20/20 vision corrected or otherwise.
• Have completed a complete ophthalmic evaluation.
• Patients recruited must be able to undergo the training to use the BrainPort® system.
• Sign informed consent (family) or assent (patient).

Exclusion criteria

• Have any neurologic disease, developmental delay, congenital genetic syndromes, congenital organ malformation, malformation syndromes or metabolic disease.
• Be on any medications known to affect the visual system