Today’s episode features one of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award winners. It’s a unique project that features both artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and visual prostheses – retinal and brain implants referred to as “bionic eyes” – in hopes of one day providing better assistive technology for incurable blindness that affects about 40 million people worldwide.

On this episode of the NNLM Discovery podcast, we talk to Dr. Michael Beyeler, assistant professor of computer science and psychology and brain sciences at UC Santa Barbara about how his Bionic Eye Lab is combining A.I. smarts with a visual prosthesis to improve the quality of life for people who are blind.

You can view a short video about the story here on the NLM YouTube Channel. Click here for an Audio Described version of the video (for the visually-impaired).

The NNLM is the outreach arm of the National Library of Medicine with the mission to advance the progress of medicine and improve the public health by providing all U.S. health professionals with equal access to biomedical information and improving the public's access to information to enable them to make informed decisions about their health. The seven Health Sciences Libraries function as the Regional Medical Library (RML) for their respective region, with Region 7 consisting of: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.

All of the artwork for this podcast series has been created with a generative AI image-to-image tool! The prompt for this episode was “Silhouette of an abstract painting of a blind person who can now see because of a smart bionic eye powered with artificial intelligence.”

Join Outreach Services Librarian, Yamila El-Khayat, for new episodes of the NNLM Discovery podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, or listen on our website www.nnlm.gov/podcast. Please be sure to like, rate, and review the show!