Since the spatial resolution of current vision prostheses is not sufficient for most patients to detect faces or perform activities of daily living, more electrodes with less crosstalk are needed to transfer complex images to the retina.
Better solutions for targeting ChRs into membrane subareas will be found, directing them into organelles, making them bimodal switchable, controlling expression more accurately, and guaranteeing better turnover and photostability for retinal prosthesis and vision in bright light.
Over recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis, however, on more conservative treatments to minimise loss of vision, problems associated with prosthesis fitting and maintenance, as well as the emotional and behavioural adjustments required in patients (van Dijk et al, 2007).
Gibbard, co-founder and CEO said: "This investment provides crucial capital to help Open Bionics deliver on its vision of making advanced prostheses available to a much wider audience of limb-different users.
New research shows that it works quite well as a visual prosthesis for the vision impaired, not relaying actual visual data but guiding them in real time with audio cues and instructions.
Future directions for simulation based research are discussed with respect to designing a functional visual prosthesis, improving functional vision in near-term low-phosphene-count devices, and pursuing image processing strategies to impart the most comprehensible prosthetic vision.
In addition to epiretinal and subretinal areas, the optic nerve (ON) is also a candidate location for implanting visual prosthesis to restore vision of patients with retinitis pigmentosa (RP).
Furthermore, development of improved techniques to target ChRs to organelles and specific membrane subareas, to make ChR bimodally switchable, to control expression more accurately, and to guarantee a better turnover of the protein when used as retinal prostheses in bright light vision will continue.
