Retinal prostheses have the chance to provide artificial vision to patients suffering from retinal degenerative diseases, and measuring the effectiveness of these devices through patient performance is critical in understanding how the devices should be designed and improved in the future. While real patient reports are invaluable, the static nature of the devices provides little information regarding what aspects are most important for practical vision. The goal of this project is firstly to simulate the type of vision that patients using a retinal prosthesis would have, including low-resolution phosphenes, distortions from axon fibre activation and desensitisation from a constant stimulus.
Healthy participants can then use the simulation to perceive either virtual objects, words or environments, or, using an outward-facing camera, the real world as a retinal prosthesis patient would. Most importantly, features of the device, such as field of view or resolution can be changed at any time so scientific comparisons and conclusions can be made about the usefulness of each feature. Preliminary studies have been conducted [1] which show the importance of the field of view with regards to effective functional vision. Future studies are focused on improvements that can be made to retinal prostheses and patient comfort while using the device.
Publications
[1] J.T. Thorn, E. Migliorini & D. Ghezzi (2020) “Virtual reality simulation of epiretinal stimulation highlights the relevance of the visual angle in prosthetic vision”, Journal of Neural Engineering 17, 056019.
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