Blind Woman Sees Again After 15 Years With New Breakthrough Technology

DiamondSmiles · #1 ● 11-15-2014, 06:21 AM

News video may be viewed here.

http://6abc.com/health/breakthrough-...to-see/396445/

WPVI
By Brian Taff

Friday, November 14, 2014

PHILADELPHIA, PA (WPVI) -- A blind Philadelphia woman is the first in our area to receive a cutting edge device.

Electronic eyes are giving her back the gift of sight.

"I look left to right. Is that the edge over there? Oh my God."

Those words were part of the magical moments in late August when Fran Fulton saw again for the first time in 15 years.

She was aided by electronic, "eyes," that, until now, were science fiction.

But Fran's new second sight is very real.

She lost her vision to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease.

In RP, cells in the retina - the vision center - die over time. By her late 40s, Fran was blind.

Last year, her son urged her to check out the Argus 2 system at Wills Eye Hospital which had just gotten government approval.

She was all for it.

"What did I have to lose? But look at what I had to gain," Fulton said.

A tiny camera in her sunglasses captures images and sends them through a small computer Fran wears.

Digital signals from the computer go back to the glasses, then wirelessly to an electronic chip, called an array, implanted in the back of her eye.

"The array bypasses the dead vision cells and stimulates the wiring that allows you to see," Dr. Allan Ho of Wills Eye Hospital said.

Dr. Ho implanted the chip during a four hour operation this summer.

Two and a half weeks later, the system was turned on and fine tuned and just like that, Fran Fulton could see.

"I just started looking around. I looked up and said, 'oh, I see something on the wall,'" Fulton said.

But, even that, has changed Fran's life.

For example, walking to her office at a disabilities services agency isn't such a white knuckle effort.

"I can now look down and see the white lines. I feel a part of everything again," Fulton said. "I didn't realize how on the outside I felt before."

"This is really breakthrough technology for people who are blinded from retinitis pigmentosa," Dr. Ho said.

As it turns out, both of Fulton's adult sons have the disease. She hopes by the time they go blind, they can get even better vision systems.

Work is already underway on versions with color and high resolution.

And Swiss doctors will soon test Argus 2 for those blinded by macular degeneration, which millions of Americans have.

The vision is not exactly like you and I see, (photo below).

It is cruder. Images are broken down into black and white pixels.

commondenom · #2 ● 11-15-2014, 01:30 PM

fucking amazing....and it's reasons like this that we have to make sure backwards assholes like muslims never take control....they'd stop anything fantastic from happening as some retard imam would get his piss stained panties in a twist about pretty much anything that wasn't thought of by another muslim....

on a side note i read a couple of years back about a similar tech....it was emotions transported across the www

sensors attached to response centres in the brains of two people would translate the emotions felt and digitize them...that digital signal was sent over the web to the other person who's sensors would translate the signal back into emotion (electrical impulses) and that person would feel what the first person had felt.....