Sight for the Blind?

Blindness is one of the most terrible conditions that human beings can experience, since those of us who can see depend on sight for almost all of our daily activities. Therefore, aids for the blind have always been given special consideration. These aids include texts written in Braille, Braille printers, electronic magnifying glasses, mobility aids, books and other texts read aloud, talking watches, and many more. A 2008 article published in Communications of the ACM summarizes the state of these aids at that time. In particular, Chieko Asakawa has been working in the field of mobility aids for the blind for years, having published at least ten articles on the subject between 1998 and 2019.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the possibility of designing artificial eyes, which would restore sight to the blind… is one of the most promising lines of research at present. So promising that these advances are sometimes announced as immediate. Thus, in December 2011, a forecast published in IEEE Spectrum for 2012 stated, among other things, the following:

Predict the next century and you can fantasize; predict the coming decade and you can wax enthusiastic. But if you’re looking at just the next 12 months, you’d better keep your feet on the ground. That’s what we’ve done in this year’s tech survey: In choosing our subjects, we considered mainly the likelihood of their figuring prominently in the coming year’s tech headlines, not whether we thought—or hoped—the technologies themselves would succeed. Among the technologies that we think will be in the news [in 2012] are… electrodes that will bring eyesight to the blind.

The article associated with the prediction announced that the first device designed to improve vision for people with retinitis pigmentosa, and possibly also for those with macular degeneration, would be marketed in 2012. The author of the article said this:

The process that allows the blind to see starts with a pair of sunglasses, which sport a tiny video camera mounted in the bridge just above the nose. The camera captures an image and sends it down a wire to a visual processing unit hanging on the patient’s belt. That VPU—which is a little larger than a smartphone—­converts the world’s complexities into a 60-pixel image in black and white, which it sends back to transponders on the glasses. From there the image goes wirelessly to antennas wrapped around the sides of the eyeball, and from there to the 60-electrode array that is tacked to a delicate retina.

In fact, the prediction was tricky, because the company Second Sight had put on sale in Europe the device in question (the Argus retinal prosthesis) in 2011, and what the magazine was actually predicting was its approval in the United States, which did not happen until early 2013, a couple of months later than IEEE Spectrum’s prediction.

When the Second Sight company went bankrupt in 2020, its blind users were left without support. As a follow-up to its 2011 article, IEEE Spectrum published a new one in 2023, analyzing possible solutions, which would involve the entry in the field of other companies.

But important news broke a few days ago, on October 20, 2025, when The New England Journal of Medicine published an article announcing that the authors had successfully developed an ocular implant that corrects age-related macular degeneration. The news has been reported in many media outlets, including Physics World and Scientific American. The first article describes it as follows:

A tiny wireless implant inserted under the retina can restore central vision to patients with sight loss due to age-related macular degeneration (AMD). In an international clinical trial, the PRIMA (photovoltaic retina implant microarray) system restored the ability to read in 27 of 32 participants followed up after a year.

The solution described consists of two components: the surgical implant in the macular area of a 2x2 millimeter plate, 30 microns thick, with a total of 378 pixels, and glasses equipped with a camera that sends the image to the implant using infrared light. The Scientific American article adds the following disclaimer:

An electronic retinal implant has improved vision in people with age-related macular degeneration—but it isn’t a full restoration, and it didn’t improve participants’ quality of life.

In any case, it’s a very important advance, which points the way to new inventions. I wouldn’t be surprised if, within a few decades, it may be possible to restore full sight to the blind. I think it’s a much more interesting and useful advance, and far more feasible, than the search for “general artificial intelligence,” which may not be possible, at least in the short term, although recent advances in the field of large language models have raised hopes.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca