 We're with the second site people who appear to have something pretty crazy that they called the bionic eye We're gonna talk to Dwayne Tutsui and Terry Byland. How you doing today guys? Very good All right, so you've got a pretty scary looking video playing on screen here of some eyeball surgery and Terry is wearing some fashionable glasses here. What do we have going on? Well the Argus 2 is is a retinal prosthesis that is designed to provide artificial vision for people who have lost it all as a result of a retinal degenerative disease such as retinitis pigmentosa and kind of the way that it that it works is it consists of an array that it gets inserted into the eye and a series of electronics and external components that will take video Out of a camera that the patient wears So by array do you mean like a like a digital sensor would be in a digital camera? It's more of a it's an electrode array very similar to I Like to compare it to an old-time baseball scoreboard So you have this scoreboard that's got a bunch of electrodes or light bulbs And if you light up certain bulbs into a certain shape you get shapes if you light them sequentially You get movement. Okay, and that's basically the way it works Except that in this case the input is from a camera that is mounted on a pair of glasses And so that explains the fashionable eye where Terry's got going on. Yes Yeah, the the the camera on his glasses will capture an image and the computer that he has in his pocket here will actually process that that image and tell the electrode array that's inside the eye which Pixels to light up so that they get those shapes and movements and things like that So Terry describe what you're holding your in your hand there. Well, this is what they call a video Processing unit and it's like a little mini computer and there's software in here And basically there's buttons here that you can push that will help you see indoors outdoors The more lights you have to work with the better the camera that's on the glasses works Okay, so just like any camera, right? Yeah. Yeah unlike well, let's say like a Nikon camera You can you can set the aperture or the the other thing to actually allow more light in right right with the shutter speed Here you just try the different buttons that you find one that actually brings in the most light Okay, okay artificial like this Like for instance in here. It's not all that bright right here, right, right? You know, it's not like our natural light, which is really good today or maybe out there somewhere in the hallway It's a little bit brighter Okay, so once you once you set that then you can actually see visually you could see a difference in the imagery for you Yeah, yeah, it goes from total blackness to being able to watch people move their necks or their heads and things like that Wow, so what can you see right now? Well, I can what I'm doing is I'm looking at your face Okay, the light is actually you know shine it the filter through the camera looking on your face there I tried to zero in on where I think your face is You know so you have the basic shape No, no shapes. No It's basically it's the field of vision is probably What do I mean about 20 degrees 20 degrees 20 degrees so you only can take in so much at a time Okay, okay, that's why if I want to see the sides of your face. I have to scan like this. Oh Interesting, okay, so it's like they said with the which was the the latest VR glasses that Microsoft was coming out with Everybody was all mad because it was a narrow field of view same thing It was like a virtual reality thing or something. Yeah. Yeah, so now now There's a couple of components on the sides of the glasses you got it He's got a camera on the front and then a circular disc and a square on the side of his glasses What are those doing? This is on and off This one top one up here is just to mute it if it starts making noises and the one in the middle is an inversion button So if you want to change something Because they say say if you're looking at something on a on a white wall and you're looking for something That's like a picture that stands out in a dark. You want to reverse the contrast. Yeah, you do that Cool one over here is the regular phase that that doesn't really work that well for me It's more like in your house kind of thing the middle one is high contrast and any time that you see Contrasts of colors. This is the best one to use the one on the end here is called the edge button and for me It's the one that gives me the most light and it allows me to see the edges of things like the windows doors Okay, so you don't run into them, huh? Those are options and those are all programmable So what the clinician will do is depending because every patient sees something differently and so what we do is we have a clinician From our company who will actually do all the programming They'll do a number of different algorithms to see what works best for them and then load that onto those three buttons So that is fantastic. Those are all customizable. Okay, so so he's got an implant in his eye that that and then There's got to be a connection to the brain somewhere Well, the way that it that it works is that We activate the retina so kind of the way that the what what what the array does is in retinas pigmentosa the outermost layer of the retinas disease and Light that normally comes in through the eye Does not activate the photoreceptors because that outer layer is is gone So what the array does is through electricity? It goes right through the non-functional layer and still activates the functional photoreceptors that lie underneath Okay, so you didn't have to go into Terry's brain. I thought maybe that's why he was so interesting not Terry's case We do have another we do have another Product that is starting clinicals later this year called the Orion and What that it does the advantage to that one is it's for all other patients who have gone blind for virtually any reason You don't even need to have eyes or optic nerves because we bypass all that and Stimulate the visual cortex of the brain directly. Well, we're looking forward to talking to you next year. Yes We later this year we expect to start the human clinical trials on the on the Orion So now even though the Argus 2 is indicated only for people with retinal degenerations. They still have to have still operational photoreceptors underneath but also they have to have a working optic nerve But what about all those other people have gone blind from glaucoma diabetic retinopathy trauma cancer They don't have anything so with the Orion will be able to address all of those people So here's a question Terry's wearing glasses, but he's gonna implant in his eye But I don't think that you've probably got a wire or going from his glasses to his eye How is how are those two things talking to each other? Well, the how many weeks can Terry go on a batter on a charge? Actually Well, yeah, essentially the way it works is that it is wireless that the device Is implanted in the eye, but the glasses the the transmitter coil on the glasses Both sends the information from the VPU and powers the device So okay, so is it inductive or yeah, it's through induction And the so the the power actually comes from the external batteries that's on the the video processing unit The other beautiful thing about the video processing unit is that all of our improvements to resolution our software based so We already have algorithms that we've developed that we're currently testing now to improve resolution That will all be downloaded simply downloaded to the patient's VPU So they don't need to have another operation or have another device implanted we can upgrade them Through software Wow, this is right now. I have 58 working electrodes And they're working on a thing where they can take one electrode and split it into three So that would upgrade me to about 200 electrodes Surgery like the Wayne was saying which the resolution would be a whole lot better Oh, that's fantastic. I just picture terry going in for a tune-up and getting a you know getting his updates. That's fantastic Yeah, all right terry comes in all the time and tests all new algorithms We we always have patients come in and test all these new algorithms. So they're the best People to test it on oh sure that is just crazy Well again, so the company is called second site the product is called argus It's the argus too. All right. Well. Thank you very much gentlemen. This is fantastic really nice talking to you Thank you. Thanks for doing this