The Gennaris Bionic System is designed for people who have lost functional vision due to traumatic injuries or conditions such as glaucoma or retinal problems. It is the result of a collaboration between two Australian institutions – Monash University and Alfred Hospital in Melbourne – and is based on implants in the brain that stimulate it with small electrical impulses that the organ interprets to create shapes and contours or recognize objects. an aid that significantly improves the user's daily life. Last summer, this artificial vision system successfully went through a first phase of tests, but there is still no date for its launch.
The Gennaris bionic vision system creates visual patterns from combinations of up to 172 points of light (phosphenes), which provide information for the individual to move indoors and outdoors, and to recognize the presence of people and objects around them. All thanks to eleven 9 x 9 mm implants in the primary visual cortex that stimulate the necessary neurons. Each implant has its own circuit, a wireless receiver, and forty-three microelectrodes as fine as a human hair.
