Support mass release of new device and give sight to the visually-impaired
Athletes at the start of a past Stanchart Nairobi International Marathon in 2007. Photo/FILE
What you need to know:
What is hoped, however, is that as its technology opens up and refinements of the device are made, it can be mass produced to make costs affordable even to us.
The last week of October is traditionally associated with the eye disease awareness activities in the health calendar.
The now well established StanChart Marathon is an example of global activities targeted at raising awareness on visual problems.
The event supports organisations endeavouring to restore sight to those afflicted by correctible causes.
Soon, it is to be followed by Trachoma Awareness Week in a week’s time.
I visited one such facility’s ‘sight restoring’ project and followed events as they did surgery to restore the sight of a young boy born with congenital cataracts.
According to Peter Ndwiga of Lion Eyesight First Hospital in Loresho, the number of such patients is increasing every year.
The hospital is run by the Lions Club, a charity and also has an outreach programme offering similar surgeries as far off as Makindu and Marigat. Since its inception, the programme has helped to restore sight to thousands, many of them benefiting from free surgery.
Interestingly and to my knowledge, the hospital also hosts the only tissue donor programme in the country.
Courtesy of the Eye Bank, the project aims at encouraging Kenyans to donate their corneas for use upon their demise for the benefit of others afflicted by surgically correctible blindness.
Mr Ndwiga says the eye bank aims at ensuring adequate supply of donor tissue to cater for the incidence of visual loss.
However, many other types of blindness due to visual neural pathway problems are not amenable to such surgeries and so cannot benefit from projects like Lions’.
Thanks to science, an interesting device will soon change all this. The gadget being featured in scientific documentaries and magazines offers the most promising of answers for the millions afflicted by retinal and visual blindness.
Nimble organ
The ingenious product of years of research helps such people “see” with their tongues and bypasses the visual pathway. While the mechanism behind it is complex, for the lay person it translates to using the tongue to interpret a physical object into an image.
Think of it as braille on the tongue. Whereas the visually-impaired use their fingers to read a braille book, a similar phenomenon on the tongue delivered by a series of tiny electrodes that transduce visual forms into electrical pixel signals is the trick.
Through training, the person can then “mentally form” an image of the signal delivered by the electrodes on the tongue. Fortunately, the human brain in healthy state is a nimble organ that can be moulded to learn quickly and, with exercise, perfect some skills.
In the documentary with aid of the gadget, the users were able to go about their ordinary daily chores including crossing roads, shopping and playing some sports.
However, like any other breakthrough in medical devices, its initial cost is way beyond reach of the average person.
Certainly few Kenyans can afford it at its current price.
When approved for use it is approximated to go for about a million shillings inclusive of the shipping, training and running costs.
What is hoped, however, is that as its technology opens up and refinements of the device are made, it can be mass produced to make costs affordable even to us.
Organisations fighting blindness could also channel resources towards its research and development to speed up its roll-out and lower costs.
