Researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy have developed a new type of intraneural electrode that bypasses the eyeball entirely and sends messages directly to the brain.
Successfully tested in rabbits, the new technology could provide a visual aid for blind people and a new means of studying vision, said study authors writing in Nature Biomedical Engineering. “Retinal prostheses can restore a functional form of vision in patients affected by dystrophies of the outer retinal layer… Optic-nerve stimulation is particularly promising because it directly activates nerve fibres, takes advantage of the high-level information processing occurring downstream in the visual pathway, does not require optical transparency and could be effective in cases of eye trauma.”
