Simon Wheatcroft went blind at age 17. Yet today, he runs marathons. Leigh Alexander explores the incredible story of how he is able to do this with the help of some particularly innovative technology. This is a re-run of a podcast we launched in June 2016
The NHS is to pay for 10 people to be implanted with a “bionic eye”, a pioneering technology that can restore some sight to those who have been blind for years.
Only a handful of people have undergone surgery in trials so far to equip them to use Argus II, which employs a camera mounted in a pair of glasses and a tiny computer to relay signals directly to the nerves controlling sight. The decision to fund the first 10 NHS patients to be given the bionic eye could pave the way for the life-changing technology to enter the mainstream.
Those who will get the equipment can currently see nothing more than the difference between daylight and darkness. The system allows the brain to decode flashes of light, so that they can learn to see movement.
One of three patients to have had the implant into the retina in trials at Manchester Royal Eye hospital is Keith Hayman, 68, from Lancashire, who has five grandchildren. He was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in his 20s. The disease causes cells in the retina gradually to stop working and eventually die. Hayman, who was originally a butcher, was registered blind in 1981, and forced to give up all work.
“Having spent half my life in darkness, I can now tell when my grandchildren run towards me and make out lights twinkling on Christmas trees,” he said. “I would be talking to a friend, who might have walked off and I couldn’t tell and kept talking to myself. This doesn’t happen anymore, because I can tell when they have gone.” They may seem like little things, he said, but “they make all the difference to me”.
The NHS will fund the first 10 patients during 2017 to have surgery at Manchester and at Moorfields Eye hospital in London. All will be carefully followed, to gather data on their progress and assess how much the bionic eye improves their daily lives. If the results are good, more patients are likely to receive the treatment in the future.
“This highly innovative NHS-funded procedure shows real promise and could change lives,” said Dr Jonathan Fielden, director of specialised commissioning at NHS England. “The NHS has given the world medical innovations ranging from modern cataract surgery to new vaccines and hip replacements. Now once again the NHS is at the forefront of harnessing ground-breaking science for the benefit of patients in this country.”
Professor Paulo Stanga, who first performed the surgery at the Manchester hospital in 2009, said they were very grateful to NHS England. “I personally believe this is a landmark decision,” he said. “It will significantly benefit patients who are completely blind – not only patients with retinitis pigmentosa and their families, but hopefully other patients in the future with other conditions, such as age-related macular degeneration.”
At the moment, there is no proven benefit from gene and stem cell therapies, said Stanga, even though he believes they will one day help. So the bionic eye is the only treatment that can give back a degree of vision to those who are completely blind..
There are an estimated 16,000 people with RP in the UK with varying degrees of deterioration in their vision. About a tenth can no longer see to count the fingers on a hand. Between 160 and 320 are thought to be eligible for a bionic eye operation. The numbers with age-related macular degeneration, however, are far higher – it is the commonest cause of blindness or severe vision loss. The ‘bionic eye’ treatment, including surgery, follow-up, equipment and rehabilitation, costs £150,000.
Some patients will do better than others, said Stanga. “Patients need to learn to interpret the newly acquired visual function,” he said. “They are going to be experiencing a pattern of light and darkness. The more they use the device, the more they learn to interpret it.
“They are not going to be able to discern faces but if they can see somebody is standing in front of them and in what direction the person is moving, that is great benefit for them. One of the main complaints people have is the feeling of isolation that they suffer. Some of our patients tell us they go to the pub and no longer feel that they may be talking to themselves.”
Newsreader and presenter Jan Leeming’s father was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration. Over a period of 15 years, she witnessed his sight deteriorate until he went almost completely blind. Not realising the condition could be inherited, it came as a terrible shock to Jan that she was herself diagnosed with the initial symptoms of the same disease
What would you do if you were told you were going to lose your eyesight in three months? It happened to Steph Cutler, who was a successful fashion designer working for brands such Ted Baker and Marks & Spencer when, in her late 20s, she was told she would lose most of her vision within three months.
As Cutler’s sight started to deteriorate as a result of the rare condition Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a friend took her on the London Eye for a last look at the cityscape. Cutler also threw an “I’m going blind” party as a way of “getting it out there” and telling all her friends at once. She then travelled for three months, visiting the US, South America and New Zealand, to see the world while she still could.
The lowest point was on her return, when her sight loss got worse and she found herself without a job – fashion design relies so much on the visual it was no longer viable – living back with her parents and struggling even to get a job interview, let alone a new job.
Blasting out U2’s Beautiful Day each morning to get herself out of bed, Cutler set two goals: “In the short term, to become employable again and in the longer term, to get my independence back. Working to achieve those goals has been the hardest thing I have ever done.”
The first step was to learn to use computers, phones and read printed information with assistive technology. Then, using her own experience of feeling unemployable as a result of acquiring a disability, Cutler spotted a gap in the market. There was a need, she felt, for disability and equality training on raising awareness of making recruitment and services open to disabled people.
Few people were doing this at the time, but it was still a difficult business model to build. Although organisations knew they should be doing more, they often didn’t prioritise it or want to pay for it, Cutler said.
And so, with the help of a government business startup scheme and funding, Making Lemonade was born. The name came from a mantra Cutler adopted while adapting to living with sight loss: “If life deals you lemons … get out there and make lemonade.” The yellow and green lemonade branding and theme runs across all marketing material, blogposts and even a recipe to ”make successful lemonade”, a free personal development guide offered on her website.
“The main challenges when I started out were that nobody knew me and I also had a steep learning curve to get up to speed about other disabilities, history and equality law. I did a lot of networking, going along to events and talking and listening to people to find out what they actually needed. This could feel like a thankless task, as there was rarely any instant business, but meeting face to face could result in proposals even three years later,” says Cutler.
She is now a trustee for charity Action for Blind People, a fellow of the Clore Social Leadership programme, represents disabled people on various national committees and has been recognised in high profile business awards including national finalist in Enterprising Young Brit 2006 and Disabled Entrepreneur of the Year in 2008.
Customer feedback led Cutler to train in new areas and add new strands to Making Lemonade, including motivational speaking, coaching and self-employment workshops. “People kept asking me to speak about my story at events but I turned them down as I didn’t ‘do’ public speaking. Eventually I realised there was no basis, apart from fear, for this. So I joined the Professional Speaking Association and worked at improving my skills, then started accepting invitations to speak. For once, being blind was an advantage – it’s a lot easier to stand up and speak to an audience when you can’t see them,” she says.
Having an interesting personal story to tell can provide a big advantage for small businesses, Cutler says. “Many SMEs are about the person behind them and if you’re comfortable telling your story, it can help you to stand out from the crowd and inspire others too. This can be great for all sorts of marketing including social media, your website, blogposts and pieces in the media.”
Now in her eleventh year of trading, Cutler is proud of what she has achieved. “I’ve worked with some amazing clients in the public, private and charity sector and have made a difference along the way,” she says.
Plans for developing her business include providing more coaching for “non-disabled” people and expanding her use of the “design thinking” approach in her consultancy work. This is a creative and hands-on approach to solving problems and developing strategies, adopted by companies such as Apple, Google and Samsung, based on the way that designers work.
Now Cutler has marked 10 years since losing her sight, by writing an ebook of memoirs and thoughts, Living with More Vision and Less Sight. She says the biggest lesson she has learned along the way is that whatever life deals you, it’s your choice how to view those circumstances. She recounts a family game over Sunday lunch which involved created six-word memoirs. Hers is: “Everything changed, all for the better.”
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The futures of the UK’s three remaining specialist hotels for the blind are in doubt, sparking fears that visually impaired people could be left isolated.
Action for Blind People is selling the Cliffden in Teignmouth, Devon; the Lauriston in Weston-super-Mare; and Windermere Manor, in the Lake District, because it can no longer justify the running costs.
The charity is hopeful that the hotels will stay open under new management, but critics of the sale believe that closure is more likely and that blind and partially sighted people will suffer.
David Haynes, 69, from South Milford, Yorkshire, said: “Without this sort of facility, I don’t know what people will do. You can’t imagine what it’s like leaving your house without any sight at all. People go there because all the staff are trained with regard to working with visually impaired people. It’s safe and secure.”
As well as being a regular visitor, Haynes sits on the Action for Blind People customer council. He is angry the council was not consulted over the decision, which was made by senior management and approved by the charity’s trustees, most of whom are blind or partially sighted.
The three hotels have swimming pools, textured surfaces, talking alarm clocks, large button phones, braille menus and facilities for guide dogs. They also provide a pick-up service from nearby stations and run supervised trips.
Action for Blind People said 2,000 visually impaired people used the hotels last year – just under half the total number of guests – although many went more than once. The charity said an increase in sighted guests is one reason it cannot justify the extra expenditure of £950,000 needed to run and maintain the hotels over the next three years.
But Haynes said the hotels provided an invaluable opportunity for the visually impaired to talk to each other and interact with the sighted. “We all learn from each other,” he said.
“It’s an indictment of 21st-century Britain that there’s no provision for the visually impaired to go to a hotel. All hotels have to have access for people in wheelchairs but they don’t all have to have staff trained to work with the visually impaired, to do small things like saying your meat is at eight o’clock [on your plate], your potatoes are at four o’clock.”
Christine Newcombe, vice-chair of Guide Dogs Circle, is another patron angry about the decision. She describes the hotels as a lifeline, particularly for the most vulnerable, who are completely blind, like herself.
“People are going to be isolated,” she said. “There’s been no consultation. No one has actually asked blind people what they actually want. The hotels offer peace of mind, health and safety.
“I just go with a friend and and leave John [her husband] at home. We have both got guide dogs. We just have a nice time. They do trips during the stays, [and] that would be difficult in an ordinary hotel.”
An Action for Blind People spokeswoman said: “We’re doing everything we can to find suitable buyers for the three Vision hotels to make sure they stay open, but we do understand that a lot of people are upset by the news that Action for Blind People will no longer be running the hotels.
“This has been a very difficult decision to make as we know how much Vision hotels mean to customers, staff and volunteers. To have kept the hotels open, we would have had to divert funds from other services and after careful consideration, we decided that this was not the right thing to do.”
She said the hotels were still taking bookings.
The aim of the venture is to produce a in depth comprehending of the problems faced by blind and partially sighted individuals as they travel in and around cities. A notion video released in 2012 outlined some of characteristics of the gadget:
More information on the Alice band is expected to be exposed in the next few months.
The information comes after researchers at Oxford University unveiled a pair of intelligent glasses that can assist men and women with constrained vision to navigate and avoid walking into obstacles.
The smart glasses, which consist of a video camera mounted on the frame of the glasses and a computer processing unit that is tiny ample to match in a pocket, are developed to increase people’s awareness of what is close to them.
Photos of close by individuals and obstacles – this kind of as kerbs, tables and chairs – are processed by specially-made computer software, and projected onto transparent electronic displays, the place the glasses’ lenses would generally be.
Meanwhile, Google has filed a US patent for embedding microscopic cameras into make contact with lenses, which could be programmed to detect light, colour, distinct objects, faces and motion without obstructing the vision of the wearer.
The device could be possibly daily life-shifting for blind consumers, as the camera and analysis components could method picture information to determine the wearer is approaching a hectic street, for example.
The lens could then situation a command to a remote gadget, this kind of as a smartphone, to omit a voice-created warning about the impending road.
“We sooner or later want to have a solution that will seem like a standard pair of glasses and value no much more than a few hundred pounds – about the identical as a intelligent telephone,” he explained.
Dr Hicks’ crew has set up testing venues in Oxford and Cambridge in which they can manage the lighting and introduce obstacles to keep away from. Participants are tracked as they navigate by way of obstacle courses, with and without intelligent glasses.
Iain Cairns from London, who was diagnosed with the inherited eye condition choroideremia at about the age of 12, described wearing the glasses as: “It is like I’ve wandered into an 80s pop video. Absolutely everyone has amazing A-ha drawings round them.”
Lyn Oliver from Faringdon in Oxfordshire, who was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in her early 20s, explained the intelligent glasses could assist when out with her guide dog.
“If Jess stops, the glasses can inform me if she’s stopped because there’s a kerb, there’s one thing on the floor or it is roadworks, and it’ll give me a sense of which way she may possibly go about the obstacle,” she explained.
The investigation and development of the glasses is funded by the Nationwide Institute for Well being Analysis (NIHR). The trials are currently being carried out with the support of the Royal Nationwide Institute of Blind Men and women (RNIB).
The group has been awarded additional funding from the Royal Society to appear at introducing more attributes into the glasses, such as encounter, object or text recognition and audio prompts.
There are approximately one hundred,000 men and women in the United kingdom alone with this reduced degree of vision and who could potentially benefit, according to the researchers
The retina is the layer of photo-sensitive cells and neurons at the back of the eye that converts light signals into nerve messages transmitted to the brain.
In the course of the experiment, Dr Canto-Soler’s crew had been capable to motivate initial growth of the retina, which then continued building on its own.
“When we started this work, we didn’t think stem cells would be ready to create up a retina virtually on their own,” Dr Canto-Soler said. “In our technique, somehow the cells knew what to do.”
At a stage equivalent to 28 weeks of foetal growth, the scientists tested the mini-retina by exposing it to pulses of light. They found that the lab-grown photoreceptors responded to light the same way as they do in the human eye.
Dr Canto-Soler, whose analysis is published in Nature Communications, said the method opened up the likelihood of generating hundreds of mini-retinas at a time from a man or woman impacted by blinding diseases.
These could be utilised to examine the triggers of retinal ailments in human tissue, rather than relying on animal versions.
Medicines tailored to personal patients could also be examined on the structures. In the prolonged term, diseased or dead retinal tissue could be replaced by laboratory-grown cells to restore vision, Dr Canto-Soler extra.
Age-relevant macular degeneration, which is induced by a dilemma with the retina, is the major cause of visual impairment in the United kingdom, affecting up to 500,000 men and women, according to NHS figures.
It is most frequent in folks more than 50, with one in ten people in excess of the age of 65 thought to be struggling from the issue to some extent.
‘Five years ago 96% of all books wouldn’t be turned into forms accessible to blind people … I’m now able to read pretty much any book I want in electronic braille’. Photograph: Image Source/Rex Features
Imagine a situation where you walk into your favourite restaurant and ask for the menu, only to be told it isn’t available. Chances are it wouldn’t stay your favourite for very long.
As a braillist – someone who uses braille – the dream for me is when the opposite happens. A small number of chain restaurants offer menus in braille; sometimes, they’re even up to date.
It is difficult to over-express the sense of liberation at being able to browse and choose your preferred pizza independently. And in Co-op supermarkets, where some of the own-brand labels feature braille, there is pride in being able to identify a bottle of wine from a label that few if any other people in the store are able to read.
All too often, though, finding anything in shops is a matter of random selection, peering in earnest, or asking for help. And just when it seemed the situation couldn’t get any worse for braillists, along come headlines suggesting the end is nigh for braille, that this communication lifeline is about to be cut off.
This week, Dr Matthew Rubery, curator of an exhibition on alternative methods of reading for blind people, described braille as “embattled”. He went on to say its biggest threat “is computer technology, which makes it much easier not to have to learn it. A lot of people fear braille won’t survive because it will be read by so few people. The use has declined and there are concerns about funding to keep it going.”
This seems to me a rather glass-half-empty view, although there is some evidence to support his argument. Anecdotally, it is claimed blind children are no longer being taught braille. This is said to be owing to sighted teachers who believe computer technology, and in particular synthesised speech, has rendered it redundant. Therefore, the teachers don’t need to learn braille either.
If this is true, and no other factors were to come into play, then the outlook might really look bad. But, like print, braille has gone through a process of evolution. It started out in classrooms as the equivalent of the slate – my five-year-old hands punched out each dot individually through a sheet of thick manilla paper. We learned to write it backwards and read it forwards.
Then Harold Wilson’s “white heat” age of technology ushered in the mechanical era. Classrooms echoed to the deafening collective rattle of 15 or more braille machines – the Stainsby, the Perkins, the Lavender – pounding away at dictation or composition.
And now, like print with its tablets, Kindles and touch screens, braille has gone digital. And it is my belief that this could well mean it becomes more widely available and infinitely more useful. This is important because it means all children in future will be able to enjoy the same degree of literacy, not to mention the same levels of liberation and pleasure, as I do now.
Think of this: I am writing and editing this piece on an Apple computer using braille from an electronic display that drives pins into the correct shapes to form a line of braille text. Once the piece is published I will be able to go to the Guardian website on my iPhone or iPad, use Bluetooth to connect up a portable braille device, and read it along with you. The main problem currently is the cost of the braille-reading equipment: the cheapest is £900.
But, fellow reader, we are now in the age of the app and of haptic technology, which communicates through vibration and touch. It is already possible for me to download an app that will create on my touch screen a virtual braille keyboard on which I can compose texts, emails, tweets and Facebook updates in braille.
Meanwhile, the search is already on for the holy grail of braille – a means of creating dots without using expensive mechanical cells that make the shape of braille characters using pins. Then the world would truly be at our fingertips.
What is needed is an app that would turn digital text on your device into electronic impulses in the shape of braille characters, transmitted by the screen of your iPad or other tablet, to be read by touch. To go back to my restaurant quandary, all I would need to do would be to call up the menu online, put it through my haptic braille app, and read it on my screen.
Add into that mix a scanning app, and I could point my device at what was on the supermarket shelf and have the haptic braille app produce the package information.
And if you think this is hopelessly optimistic pie in the sky, it’s worth remembering that less than five years ago 96% of all books produced would never be turned into forms accessible to blind people. But with the advent of e-books and existing technology, I am now able to read pretty much any book I want to in electronic braille.
So rather than seeing the end of braille, we could be entering a golden age of access and communication. Here’s to more pizza, more wine, and more braille.
‘Five years ago 96% of all books wouldn’t be turned into forms accessible to blind people … I’m now able to read pretty much any book I want in electronic braille’. Photograph: Image Source/Rex Features
Imagine a situation where you walk into your favourite restaurant and ask for the menu, only to be told it isn’t available. Chances are it wouldn’t stay your favourite for very long.
As a braillist – someone who uses braille – the dream for me is when the opposite happens. A small number of chain restaurants offer menus in braille; sometimes, they’re even up to date.
It is difficult to over-express the sense of liberation at being able to browse and choose your preferred pizza independently. And in Co-op supermarkets, where some of the own-brand labels feature braille, there is pride in being able to identify a bottle of wine from a label that few if any other people in the store are able to read.
All too often, though, finding anything in shops is a matter of random selection, peering in earnest, or asking for help. And just when it seemed the situation couldn’t get any worse for braillists, along come headlines suggesting the end is nigh for braille, that this communication lifeline is about to be cut off.
This week, Dr Matthew Rubery, curator of an exhibition on alternative methods of reading for blind people, described braille as “embattled”. He went on to say its biggest threat “is computer technology, which makes it much easier not to have to learn it. A lot of people fear braille won’t survive because it will be read by so few people. The use has declined and there are concerns about funding to keep it going.”
This seems to me a rather glass-half-empty view, although there is some evidence to support his argument. Anecdotally, it is claimed blind children are no longer being taught braille. This is said to be owing to sighted teachers who believe computer technology, and in particular synthesised speech, has rendered it redundant. Therefore, the teachers don’t need to learn braille either.
If this is true, and no other factors were to come into play, then the outlook might really look bad. But, like print, braille has gone through a process of evolution. It started out in classrooms as the equivalent of the slate – my five-year-old hands punched out each dot individually through a sheet of thick manilla paper. We learned to write it backwards and read it forwards.
Then Harold Wilson’s “white heat” age of technology ushered in the mechanical era. Classrooms echoed to the deafening collective rattle of 15 or more braille machines – the Stainsby, the Perkins, the Lavender – pounding away at dictation or composition.
And now, like print with its tablets, Kindles and touch screens, braille has gone digital. And it is my belief that this could well mean it becomes more widely available and infinitely more useful. This is important because it means all children in future will be able to enjoy the same degree of literacy, not to mention the same levels of liberation and pleasure, as I do now.
Think of this: I am writing and editing this piece on an Apple computer using braille from an electronic display that drives pins into the correct shapes to form a line of braille text. Once the piece is published I will be able to go to the Guardian website on my iPhone or iPad, use Bluetooth to connect up a portable braille device, and read it along with you. The main problem currently is the cost of the braille-reading equipment: the cheapest is £900.
But, fellow reader, we are now in the age of the app and of haptic technology, which communicates through vibration and touch. It is already possible for me to download an app that will create on my touch screen a virtual braille keyboard on which I can compose texts, emails, tweets and Facebook updates in braille.
Meanwhile, the search is already on for the holy grail of braille – a means of creating dots without using expensive mechanical cells that make the shape of braille characters using pins. Then the world would truly be at our fingertips.
What is needed is an app that would turn digital text on your device into electronic impulses in the shape of braille characters, transmitted by the screen of your iPad or other tablet, to be read by touch. To go back to my restaurant quandary, all I would need to do would be to call up the menu online, put it through my haptic braille app, and read it on my screen.
Add into that mix a scanning app, and I could point my device at what was on the supermarket shelf and have the haptic braille app produce the package information.
And if you think this is hopelessly optimistic pie in the sky, it’s worth remembering that less than five years ago 96% of all books produced would never be turned into forms accessible to blind people. But with the advent of e-books and existing technology, I am now able to read pretty much any book I want to in electronic braille.
So rather than seeing the end of braille, we could be entering a golden age of access and communication. Here’s to more pizza, more wine, and more braille.
A Metropolitan police officer sporting a body camera. Photograph: EPA
It was supposed to be the commence of a new daily life, but soon after moving to Stevenage Previous Town in Hertfordshire last November, I found myself a target of haters and abusers in public. I nevertheless do not know why.
It started with a group of young lads trying to manual me in to a lamppost before laughing and operating away. Not lengthy afterwards, the circumstance grew worse, with groups of largely younger males circling me, swearing, and in one particular harrowing situation, telling me they had been filming for YouTube as they urged me to “journey above the curb you blind bitch” and “fuck off back to blind land”.
A lot of other incidents occurred before I broke down crying one day on my living area floor. But like forty% of detest crime victims, I still did not report it. I had no way of identifying the perpetrators, the men and women whose actions had persuaded me not to leave my property alone.
These individuals created me doubt almost everything about myself and my well worth. I felt pathetic because I could not defend myself or identify them, and it made me feel about what would come about if I was physically attacked or even raped. I grew to become a wreck, overwhelmed by dark thoughts.
I last but not least spoke to the police following the predicament came to a head, 1 early Saturday evening. Even though walking via the Previous Town higher street with my fiance, who is also registered blind, a group of younger males started out laughing and swearing at us. As we walked past, a single explained they have been going to get our income, even though one more shouted, “we’ll locate out how a lot they can see”.
I truthfully believed I was about to be physically attacked I shouted for the group to leave me alone and asked: “Why are you performing this?” My concern was so intense that I lost handle of my bladder.
Unaware of fairly how scared and degraded I felt, my fiance employed his mobile phone to try to film the individuals concerned. But when we took this footage to the police, it was also shaky to provide more than a number of small clues.
In the following days and weeks, as the abuse continued, I researched body-worn cameras, ultimately securing the loan of some from Reveal Media and Taser International – who have presented the cameras currently on trial with 500 frontline response officers in the Metropolitan police. This kit was unavailable for me to obtain from TSR, Taser’s United kingdom supplier, which was a shame due to the fact the safety they supplied, and the protection I felt, meant far more to me than I can describe.
As a result, I was ready to consider footage to Hertfordshire police, who have been extremely supportive during. They recognized some of the individuals involved, and following speaking to a single of them, the abuse lastly stopped.
Body-worn cameras gave me the confidence to depart my residence alone and provided the proof that this behaviour was occurring. Prior to I collected this proof some people identified it tough to think. I would extremely recommend the use of entire body-cams to any individual suffering abuse on the street, whilst including the apparent overall health warning that no one ought to put themselves in danger in an attempt to gather proof.
The abuse and hate almost destroyed me. But I decided to use the expertise to educate people about the genuine human charges of disability hate crime. In 2012-13, 1,841 incidents had been reported to police in England and Wales – a five% improve on the earlier 12 months – but that is only a modest reflection of the problem. The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates that there are, on average, 62,000 disability-motivated hate crimes each and every 12 months. A third of the reported crimes (32%) concerned violence.
Operating with Stevenage borough council and Hertfordshire police, I have set up a Respect campaign, going to colleges and youth groups to inform my story, and spreading the word on Facebook and Twitter (#RespectCampaign). I’m established to raise awareness, produce methods to fight these crimes, and to get the message across that dislike hurts.
Each lens could be designed to contain several small camera elements and sensors which could be programmed to detect light, colour, distinct objects, faces and motion without having obstructing the vision of the wearer.
The new perform of camera-embedded lenses is being designed alongside Google Glass, the company’s wearable pc which goes on sale today in the US for one particular day only.
The glucose-monitoring make contact with lens for diabetics
Earlier this 12 months the organization unveiled a prototype make contact with lens it had been developing to keep track of glucose levels in the tears of diabetics.
The lenses use a minuscule glucose sensor and a wireless transmitter to assist individuals between the world’s 382m diabetics who need insulin preserve a shut observe on their blood sugar and alter their dose.
“We’re testing a intelligent get in touch with lens that we constructed that measures the glucose ranges in tears utilizing a small wireless chip and a miniaturised glucose sensor,” explained the Google X undertaking leader for the sensible make contact with lens, Brian Otis.
The gadget, which seems to be like a normal get in touch with lens, contains two twinkling glitter-specks that are loaded with tens of 1000′s of miniaturised transistors and is ringed with a hair-thin antenna.
“We’ve had to perform really tough to build tiny, lower-powered electronics that operate on low ranges of energy and actually small glucose sensors,” Mr Otis explained at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
“It really is really distressing”, says Daniel Smith, who lost his sight in 2012. “I bear in mind just pounding my bedroom, you just don’t consider that it will ever occur to you.”
Significantly less than 1 in 10 folks who were going blind had been supplied formal counselling soon after they found out they have been losing their sight, their review found.
Researchers mentioned even the most fundamental details was not provided, by clinics which are struggling to cope with Britain’s ageing population.
Virtually one particular quarter of patients leave the hospital not being aware of what eye situation they have, the study discovered.
In a video launched by the RNIB, Ophthalmic Nurse Counsellor Louise de Board emphasises the relevance for help for the newly diagnosed.
“It is important that men and women who are newly diagnosed as visually impaired have accessibility to support, suggestions, rehabilitation and other solutions.”
Video courtesy RNIB
