Neuralink Announced Blindsight Brain Chip to Reverse Blindness and Improve Vision
The second chip of Elon Musk's company, (the first was Telepathy), received the designation of innovative devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Spanish translation by Revista Ariel
September 18, 2024
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Neuralink, the Elon Musk, continues to advance in its brain implants with the Blindsight project, a technology in the form of a chip that will allow in some cases to recover sight "even for those who have been blind from birth", and which has received the designation of an innovative device by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The company was founded in 2017 as a project focused on integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into the human brain. Thus, he has stood out for projects such as Thelepathy, the brain implant that has already been tested in people and with which the patient is able to carry out actions such as controlling a computer mouse, playing chess and playing music, all with direct signals from the brain.
The technology company continues to advance in brain implants thanks to its Blindsight project, the company's second brain chip, specifically designed to restore sight to blind people, which has received innovation designation from the FDA.
Specifically, the designation of innovative product is a label that the agency gives to certain devices that provide a more effective treatment or diagnosis of "life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating" diseases or conditions, as it points out on its website.
Thus, the Innovative Devices Program, in which this designation is framed, aims to accelerate the development, evaluation and review of the device in question, for its pre-market approval.
In this regard, Neuralink announced that its Blindsight brain implant has been designated as an innovative device by the FDA, offering a boost to its mission to "restore sight to those who have lost it", as detailed in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Following this line, as Elon Musk himself shared through another publication in X, this designation is part of some advances in the development of Blindsight. As he has advanced, it will be a chip that will allow "even those who have been blind from birth" or have "lost both eyes and the optic nerve" to see, as long as the visual cortex is intact.
In this regard, Musk explained that, although at first the vision will be low-resolution, a quality that he has compared to the graphics of the old Atari video game console, over time "it will have the potential to be better than natural vision".
In fact, the owner of the technology company has pointed out that, in the future, Blindsight will be able to allow things such as "seeing in infrared, ultraviolet or even radar wavelengths", thanks to its technology.
With all this, Neuralink encourages users who want to try their brain implants to sign up for their patient program. However, at the moment, Blindsight's chip is not accepted for human testing.
