Rods and Cones. Millions of them are in the back of every healthy human eye.

They are
biological solar cells in the retina that convert light to electrical impulses -- impulses that travel
along the optic nerve to the brain where images are formed.When tiny electrodes are placed
behind the retina those acts as rods and cones.
A bionic eye implant may help millions of blind people to see the world.US researchers have
been given green signal by the government to go ahead with the practical project They will use
prototype device in 50 to 75 patients.The Argus II system uses a spectacle-mounted camera to
feed visual information to electrodes in the eye.The researchers got success in less improved
version of the system. When in that retinal implant the blinds could see light, shape and
movements."What we are trying to do is take real-time images from a camera and convert them
into tiny electrical pulses that would jump-start the otherwise blind eye and allow patients to
see," said Professor Mark Humayun from the University of California.There are two type of
diseases which cause blindness, they are macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa.Both
diseases cause the retinal cells to die gradually. Eye become unable to process the light
,making the human blindThe new devices work by implanting an array of tiny electrodes into the
back of the retina.A camera is used to capture pictures, and a processing unit, about the size of
a small handheld computer and worn on a belt, converts the visual information into electrical
signals. These are then sent back to the glasses and wirelessly on to a receiver just under the
surface of the front of the eye, which in turn feeds them to the electrodes at the rear. It happens
in real time.The new implant is too small compared to earlier one, which require very small
surgeryThe scientists are studying the impact of implant over the brain.It is a very good news for
blinds and charitable organizations associated with the blind. When commercialized those
implant will cost$30000 for each

ABSTRACT:

In a healthy eye, the rods and cones on the retina convert light into tiny electrochemical
impulses that are sent through the optic nerve and into the brain, where they’re decoded
into images. If the retina no longer functions correctly—due to conditions such as Retinitis
pigmentosa (RP) or Age-related Macular degeneration (AMD)—the optic nerve can be given
information from an artificial source bypassing the photoreceptor mechanism in the path.
Capturing images and converting them into electrical signals is the easy part. The much
trickier part is wiring the input into a person’s nervous system. Retinal implants currently
being tested pick up radio signals from a camera mounted on a pair of glasses and then
directly stimulate the nerve cells behind the malfunctioning rods and cones. Subretinal
implantation proves to be a better solution than Epiretinal implantation in leading the blind
into light.

What is Bionics?
The field of bionics concerns the systematic technical implementation of solutions nature
has found for particular problems. Today, there are many new, fascinating approaches for
developing bionic innovations due to recent dynamic advances in biological research and
technology – especially at the molecular level. While biotechnology addresses the scientific-
technical realm lying between biology and chemistry, bionics closes the gaps separating the
fields of biology, physics and engineering. Bionics pursues an interdisciplinary approach to
solving application oriented problems. The results of bionic research and development are,
however, never reducible to a one to one copy of the models in nature which provided the
original inspiration.

The Bionic eye:

Bionics has already opened the door for replacing lenses and corneas and is focusing on
understanding how to engineer a new eye for those who have a retinal disease, which would
enable 10 million people to regain a sense of sight. The idea for sending an electrical
current to the nerve ganglia behind the retina started in 1988 when a blind person
demonstrated that he could see points of light by the ARCC (artificial retina component
chip). This tested method proved that the nerves behind the retina could still possibly
function even though the retina degenerated. Scientists believe that if they could replace
the retina with a device that could translate images to electrical impulses then vision could
be restored. But the salty conditions of the eye could encourage corrosion in the delicate
electronics required for this technology. Researchers, however, have designed a chip that
could possibly work because it would use an external laser to power the chip. This should
eliminate the problem of the how to keep a battery working in the wet, salty environment of
the eye. The power source would have to be able to pass through the cornea without
damaging the corneal tissue, though.

Fig: Smart “EyeBand”

A light tap on the side of your head could one day restore your eyesight, believe scientists.
The tap would tighten a band of artificial muscle wrapped round your eyeballs, changing
their shape and bringing blurry images into focus. While the idea has a high 'yuk' factor, the
people behind it are confident it will be a safe and effective way to improve vision. By using
artificial muscle a "smart eye band". It will be stitched to the sclera, the tough white outer
part of the eyeball, and activated by an electromagnet in a hearing-aid-sized unit fitted
behind one ear. Most of the eye's focusing is done by the cornea, the hard transparent
surface that covers both the pupil and the iris; the lens is responsible only for fine-tuning.
Light travels through the cornea and lens to focus on the retina at the back of the eyeball.
The closer an object is, the farther back in the eye it will be focused.
The lens compensates by adjusting its strength to bring the focus back onto the retina. If
the cornea or lens do not focus strongly enough or the eyeball is too short, the light will
focus behind the retina, blurring images of close-up objects. This is long-sightedness.
Conversely, if the eyeball is too long, the light will focus in front of the retina, yielding the
blurry images of far-off objects characteristic of short-sightedness.
Tightening the smart eye band causes the eyeball to elongate, just as squeezing the middle
of a peeled hard-boiled egg causes the egg to lengthen. In long-sighted people this pushes
the retina backwards, bringing close-up objects back into focus. Expanding the eye band
causes the eyeball to shorten. In short-sighted people this will bring the retina forward to
intersect with the focused light, making far-off images sharp and clear again. Stitching a
band of artificial muscle to your eyeball sounds drastic, but the necessary surgical
techniques are already commonly used for treating detached retinas. This smart eye band is
far more flexible than laser surgery, in which a laser flattens the cornea by eroding part of
it.
Retinal prosthesis:

Researchers published a design of an optoelectronic retinal prosthesis system that can

stimulate the retina with resolution corresponding to a visual acuity of 20/80--sharp enough
to orient yourself toward objects, recognize faces, read large fonts, watch TV and, perhaps
most important, lead an independent life. The researchers hope their device may someday
bring artificial vision to those blind due to retinal degeneration.
Degenerative retinal diseases result in death of photoreceptors--rod-shaped cells at the
retina's periphery responsible for night vision and cone-shaped cells at its center responsible
for color vision. Worldwide, 1.5 million people suffer from retinitis pigmentosa (RP), the
leading cause of inherited blindness. In the Western world, age-related macular
degeneration (AMD) is the major cause of vision loss in people over age 65, and the issue is
becoming more critical as the population ages. Each year, 700,000 people are diagnosed
with AMD, with 10 percent becoming legally blind, defined by 20/400 vision. Many AMD
patients retain some degree of peripheral vision. If one could bypass the photoreceptors and
directly stimulate the inner retina with visual signals, one might be able to restore some
degree of sight.
To that end, the researchers plan to directly stimulate the layer underneath the dead
photoreceptors using a system that consists of a tiny video camera mounted on transparent
"virtual reality" style goggles. There's also a wallet-sized computer processor, a solar-
powered battery implanted in the iris and a light-sensing chip implanted in the retina.

Fig: Anti-blindness Goggles

The chip is the size of half a rice grain--3 millimeters--and allows users to perceive 10
degrees of visual field at a time. One design includes an orchard of pillars: One side of each
pillar is a light-sensing pixel and the other side is a cell-stimulating electrode. Pillar density
dictates image resolution, or visual acuity. The strip of orchard across the top third of the
chip is densely planted. The strip in the middle is moderately dense, and the strip at the
bottom is sparser still. Dense electrodes lead to better image resolution but may inhibit the
desirable migration of retinal cells into voids near electrodes, so the different electrode
densities of a current chip design allow the researchers to explore parameters and come up
with a chip that performs optimally. Another design--pore electrodes--involves an array of
cavities with stimulating electrodes located inside each of them.

Fig: Orchard of Pillars

WORKING:
How does the system work when viewing, say, a flower? First, light from the flower enters
the video camera. The video camera then sends the image of the flower to the wallet-sized
computer for complex processing. The processor then wirelessly sends its image of the
flower to an infrared LED-LCD screen mounted on the goggles. The transparent goggles
reflect an infrared image into the eye and onto the retinal chip. Just as a person with normal
vision cannot see the infrared signal coming out of a TV remote control, this infrared flower
image is also invisible to normal photoreceptors. But for those sporting retinal implants, the
infrared flower electrically stimulates the implant's array of photodiodes. The result? They
may not have to settle for merely smelling the roses.

Fig: Working of a Retinal Implant

Complex processing: The eyes have it

The eye is a complex machine. It has more than 120million photoreceptors i.e., equivalent
to 100 megapixels. And if electronic cameras do a good job of image processing, the eye
does a spectacular job, compressing information before sending it to the brain through the 1
million axons that make up the optic nerve. We have a built-in processor in the eye. Before
it goes into the brain, the image is significantly processed.
The bottom layer of photoreceptors is where rhodopsin--a protein pigment that converts
light into an electrical signal--exists. But as far as signal processing is concerned, the signal
enters the inner nuclear layer, populated with bipolar, amacrine and horizontal cells. These
three cellular workhouses process the signals and transfer them to the ganglion cell layer,
or "output cascade" of nerves that deliver signal pulses to the brain.
It's best to place an implant at the earliest accessible level of image processing. The earliest
accessible level in degenerated retina is in the nuclear layer, and the more you go along the
chain of image processing, the more complex the signals become.
Researchers try to utilize most of the processing power remaining in the retina after retinal
degeneration by placing their implant on the side of the retina facing the interior of the eye
("subretinal" placement), as opposed to the idea of placing retinal implants on the side of
the retina facing the outside of the eyeball ("epiretinal" placement).
A crucial aspect of visual perception is eye motion. Due to the eye's natural image-
processing strengths by subretinal placement of implants, the system tracks rapid
intermittent eye movements required for natural image perception.
In the subretinal system, image amplification and other processing occur in the hardware,
outside the eye. If amplification occurred inside the implant's pixels, as it does in epiretinal,
there'd be no way short of surgery to make adjustments.

Bionics and Physics:

The new design answers major questions about what's feasible for bionic devices. Biology
imposes limitations, such as the needs for a system that will not heat cells by more than 1
degree Celsius and for electrochemical interfaces that aren't corrosive.
Current retinal implants provide very low resolution--just a few hundred pixels. But several
thousand pixels would be required for the restoration of functional sight. The Stanford
design employs a pixel density of up to 2,500 pixels per millimeter, corresponding to a
visual acuity of 20/80, which could provide functional vision for reading books and using the
computer.
A major limiting factor in achieving high resolution concerns the proximity of electrodes to
target cells. A pixel density of 2,500 pixels per square millimeter corresponds to a pixel size
of only 20 micrometers. But for effective stimulation, the target cell should not be more
than 10 micrometers from the electrode. It is practically impossible to place thousands of
electrodes so close to cells. With subretinal implants but not epiretinal ones, researchers
discovered a phenomenon--retinal migration--that they now rely on to encourage retinal
cells to move near electrodes--within 7 to 10 microns. Within three days, cells migrate to fill
the spaces between pillars and pores.

Conclusion:
In a more specific meaning, bionics is a creativity technique that tries to use biological
prototypes to get ideas for engineering solutions. This approach is motivated by the fact
that biological organisms and their organs have been well optimized by evolution.

A less common and maybe more recent meaning of the term "bionics" refers to merging
organism and machine. This approach results in hybrid systems combining biological and
engineering parts, which can also be referred as cybernetic organism (the cyborg).