Lifesavers Come in Many Technological Flavors
From: Electronic Design Megatrends - 06/30/2005 - page 83
By: Roger Allen

The Eyes and Ears Have It
Two of the most successful human-organ technological achievements concern
artificial eyes for the visually disabled or blind and artificial ears for
the hard of hearing and deaf. In fact, bionic eyes and retinal and cochlea
implants are already here. 

One ambitious program involves the University of Southern California's Doheny
Retina Institute and Keck School of Medicine, Second Sight LLC, Texas
Instruments, and U.S. national laboratories. These groups are trying to
produce an artificial retina, which already shows great promise. The work is
being funded by the US Department of Energy (DoE) under the auspices of the
DoE's Artificial Retina Program. A 60-electrode retina was squeezed into a
5-mm2 area retinal platform. It's believed to be the highest
channel-electrode density per unit area.  

Another ambitious retinal prosthesis project, funded in part by the US Air
Force and VSX Corp., is working on a means of directly stimulating an eye's
inner retina without using signals to restore some degree of sight to
visually impaired individuals. The 3-mm chip lets users perceive 10° of
vision.  

Combating blindness is also a goal of the University of Utah, working with
Oak Ridge National Labs and the University of Tennessee's Health Science
Center. Similar work is ongoing at MIT as well as at universities in Japan
and Germany. 

Bionic ear development can be summed up in one word: spectacular. The
University of Michigan has already created the first MEMS lifesized
implantable mechanical cochlea. These implants work by sending signals for
different frequencies to electrodes implanted in the cochleal spiral. The
auditory nerves then transport these signals to the brain. Arrays of sensors
added to the mechanical cochlea help drive the electrodes in a cochleal
implant. 

For the hard of hearing, NVE Corp. developed giant magnetoresistive (GMR)
sensors that automatically adjust the sound's volume in hearing aids without
the user's intervention. These spintronic GMR sensors, built by Starkey
Laboratories, work by acting on an electron's spin rather than its charge to
store information. 

For the deaf, the Georgia Tech Research Institute licensed a wearable
captioning technology to Peacock Communications, which is offering a software
system it calls COMMplements. The software taps into IEEE 802.11b wireless
transmission capabilities to give deaf mobile users easy Internet access to
captions for sporting events via PDAs. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=10603

Links:
Doheny Eye Institute
http://www.usc.edu/hsc/doheny/

Keck School of Medicine
http://www.usc.edu/schools/medicine/ksom.html

Second Sight
http://www.2-sight.com/

Artificial Retina Project
http://www.doemedicalsciences.org/abt/retina/retinas.shtml

NVE Corporation
http://www.nve.com/

Starkey Laboratories
http://www.starkey.com/pages/indexNoFlash.html

Wearable Captioning System to Make Public Venues Accessible
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/511079/

Wearable Captioning Device
http://www.wirelessrerc.gatech.edu/projects/development/d2.html

Virtual Voices
http://www.physorg.com/news3737.html

Peacock Communications
http://www.peacockcomm.com/