Jay Clemens
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will develop a retinal prosthesis system with $4 million in funding from Mann Fund.
The lab will will work with Second Sight Medical Products Inc. to embed vision and eye tracking sensors into the glasses for the system to identify obstacles, doorways, hallways and objects within a household, Johns Hopkins APL said Wednesday.
The information will then be formatted and displayed into the retinal prosthesis.
Johns Hopkins APL plans to incorporate the components of the retinal prosthesis into a semiautonomous controller to aid in robotic manipulators and remote devices under the Hybrid Augmented Reality Multimodal Operation Neural Integration Environment program.
The HARMONIE program aims to combine elements of computer vision, autonomous manipulation and a user interface in order to address cognitive burden of the user.
Kapil Katyal, HARMONIE project manager, said the program is intended to integrate this system into a small form factor glasses and that a prototype is expected in less than four years.
“This system would enable a broad base of users to efficiently and effectively control dexterous manipulators like the MPL, and would also allow APL to develop innovative solutions in contemporary general-purpose human computer interaction technologies such as head-mounted displays, augmented reality, eye-tracking, and brain-computer interfaces,†he added.
