William H. Dobelle - Career and Artificial Vision

Career and Artificial Vision

Dobelle was the CEO of the Dobelle Institute, headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, which concentrates on artificial vision for the blind. He was associate director of the Institute of Biological Engineering at the University of Utah and director of the Division of Artificial Organs at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was a founding fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He was also inducted as a Founding Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 1993, one of the highest honors available to an American scientist. Dr. Dobelle was a co- nominee with Dr. Willem Johan Kolff for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003.

He bought Avery Laboratories (now Avery Biomedical Devices) in 1983, where he worked on neurostimulation and the artificial eye. Dr. Dobelle led one of several teams of scientists around the world seeking to develop technology for artificial vision. Dobelles' teams developed a brain implant which films the visual field in front of the patient and transmits it to the brain's visual cortex, allowing the patient to see outlines. He received widespread publicity on January 17, 2000, when was announced that a patient known as "Jerry", blind after a blow to his head 36 years previous, had regained his ability see thanks to the artificial eye Dobelle had spent over 30 years developing. Jerry "sees" by wearing spectacles attached to a miniature camera and an ultrasonic rangefinder. They feed signals to a computer worn on the waistband, which processes the video and distance data, which is then sent by another computer to 68 platinum electrodes implanted in Jerry's brain, on the surface of the visual cortex. He sees a simple display of dots that outline an object. Jerry's vision is the same as a severely shortsighted person - equivalent to 20/400. He is able to read two-inch letters at five feet. Dobelle's "vision project" has been experimented in several people, allowing individuals who were once completely blind to see the outlines of images in the form of white dots on a black background. In 2002, his creation even allowed 38 year-old Jens Naumann, a blind man, to drive a car at the 48th annual American Society for Artificial Internal Organs conference. Cheri Robertson, a 41 year-old woman who was also implanted with the system, was profiled in the documentary "Extraordinary People" in 2008.