20000118

Blind man can read thru camera wired to brain

NEW YORK: A blind man can read large letters and navigate around big objects by using a tiny camera wired directly to his brain, the first artificial eye to provide useful vision, a researcher reports.

The 62-year-old man doesn't see an image. He perceives up to 100 specks of light that appear and disappear, like stars that come and go behind passing clouds, as his field of vision shifts.

But as he showed a reporter last week, that's enough to let him find a mannequin in a room, walk to a black stocking cap hanging on a white wall, and then return to the mannequin to plop the cap on its head. He also can recognise a 2-inch-tall letter from five feet away, said researcher William Dobelle.

"He can do remarkably well" with the limited visual signal, said Dobelle, who is developing the artificial vision system.

The man, who asked to be identified only as Jerry, has been blind since the age of 36. He volunteered for the study and got the brain implant in 1978; scientists have been working since then to improve the software.

Dobelle is the Chairman of the Dobelle Institute, a medical device company in New York. He describes the device and its performance in this month's issue of the ASAIO Journal, a publication of the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs.

Richard Normann, who studies artificial vision at the University of Utah, said he's encouraged by how much Jerry can do. He said Dobelle's report suggests that, someday, even limited signals to the brain will let blind people do relatively complicated visual tasks.