In the old TV show “The Six Million Dollar Man,” astronaut Steve Austin was given bionic body parts after a horrific crash. Austin gets a new right arm, two replacement legs and a left eye with a zoom lens and night-vision capacities.
The Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System isn’t quite that advanced. But for the vision-impaired, the “bionic retina” is a huge leap forward.
The device, which was created by the California-based company Second Sight Medical Products, has been available in Europe since 2011.
It received U.S. approval in February – the first visual prosthesis to do so. Second Sight CEO Robert Greenberg has devoted more than 20 years of his life to the invention.
The Argus II functions as an artificial retina, the light-sensitive part of the eye that collects image information and passes it along to the brain through the optic nerve.
(It’s often considered similar to the film in a camera.) People with a disease called retinitis pigmentosa (RP) – about 100,000 Americans -- lose the retina’s light-sensitive cells. It’s here that the Argus II takes over. Read full story here
