Blindness

Postdoctoral researchers Marin and Lukas Vogelsang speak with Science reporter Christie Wilcox about their recent work finding “the poor color vision that newborns normally have actually helps them develop well-rounded vision overall.” “The question that really drove this study is why we are so good at recognizing faces and objects in black and white photos and movies,” explains Marin Vogelsang. “And we found an answer to this when studying children in India who were born blind and were treated for their blindness as a part of Project Prakash.”

Prof. James Fujimoto and research affiliate Eric Swanson have been named recipients of the Sanford and Sue Greenberg Prize to End Blindness, reports Sandrine Ceurstemont for National Geographic. “The winners were chosen based on the strength of their contributions to eliminate blindness, the ambitious aim set out by the prize organizers in 2012,” Ceurstemont explains.

In an article for Science, Rhitu Chatterjee writes about Project Prakash, an effort started by Prof. Pawan Sinha to help children with preventable or treatable blindness see. Chatterjee writes that the project has brought hundreds of young people, “into the light—while putting the field of visual neuroscience in a new light as well.”

Writing for The New Yorker, Patrick House examines Professor Pawan Sinha’s work with sight restoration. “A remarkable thing about the brain’s processing capabilities is that, even with less than perfect image quality, it can extract a great deal of meaning about the visual world,” says Sinha of the benefits of sight restoration surgery. 

Lenny Bernstein of The Washington Post writes about a new study conducted by researchers from MIT and Johns Hopkins University that showed that sightless people, “understand how others see the world in the same way that sighted people do — though they have never personally experienced a single visual image.”

Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Danielle Muoio writes about the FingerReader, a ring developed by researchers from the MIT Media Lab to help people with visual impairment read. “The ring’s webcam takes pictures of a group of words and then funnels the images into a companion app on a computer, which then reads the text out loud,” Muoio reports. 

Liat Clark writes for Wired about the FingerReader, a 3-D printed device developed at the MIT Media Lab that can translate text from printed materials into a robotic voice for the visually impaired. The device has been in development for three years. 

“Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a ring-shaped device that slips around a user’s pointer finger, scans any text above the fingertip, and reads it aloud in a robotic voice,” writes Dan Kedmey for Time.

“Lexington-based MicroCHIPS, a developer of implantable drug delivery devices, has been quietly working on a birth control product that can be embedded in a woman’s body,” writes Steve Annear of Boston Magazine. The technology was originally developed in Professor Robert Langer’s lab.

Associated Press reporter Rodrique Ngowi writes about how researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed a prototype of an audio reading device for the blind. The device, which is in the early stages of development, is produced by a 3-D printer and is equipped with a small camera that scans text.