People with blindness can read again after retinal implant and special glasses
12 comments
·October 21, 2025RodgerTheGreat
For the sake of the patients, I hope there's a better long-term service plan than Second Sight Medical Products had:
cjaackie
The one thing I maybe missed, is there anything that can be done to reduce the risk of developing Age-Related Macular Degeneration?
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jasfi
Lutein may prevent or slow it. It's the best general eye supplement I've found too.
MathMonkeyMan
I don't know, probably not. My dad has wet macular degeneration, and it's treated with injections into the eyeball every few months. The treatment works well, but timing the injections is tricky. Too often and the side-effects become significant. Not often enough and you can get a retinal bleed, which my dad did. Fortunately he regained most of the vision lost in the bleed, and now they've increased the frequency of the injections. He'd probably be blind by now without them. Not to mention the cataract surgery and the glaucoma...
It isn't carrots.
knifie_spoonie
Wearing sunglasses apparently helps. You just need to make sure they have a proper UV rating, a lot of the cheap ones you get online don't do a good job of blocking UV.
jwrallie
Years ago I saw on TV a report where people bought several sunglasses sold in the street in Brazil and compared to the expensive brands and they all cut UV quite effectively.
Not that I would trust national TV test methodologies and risk my vision but it was a curious result.
czl
Those that fail to block uv can leave your eyes exposed to more UV than if you were not wearing any sun glasses.
ghostpepper
My layperson understanding is this happens because the mechanism that dilates the pupil responds to visible light so glasses cause it to open wider, but if they don’t block UV then you end up with more UV exposure than if you didn’t wear anything
firecall
Just like Geordi La Forge!
Star Trek TNG is here!
nextworddev
Now that’s some thing LLMs can’t do!
Edit: cue something something “transfer learning”
shagie
Microsoft’s Seeing AI, a decade ago. https://blogs.microsoft.com/accessibility/seeing-ai/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03420-x