Abstract
Visual prosthesis development relays in the ability of the visual system to evoke visual topographically organized perceptions called phosphenes when it is electrically stimulated. There have been many approaches to quantify phosphenes and describe their position in the visual field but no one managed to be accurate and easy to be handled by visually impairment individuals. Here, we present a highly accurate, intuitive and freely movement method to draw phosphenes in the 3D visual space. We use an infrared sensor from the commercial Kinect hardware through a customized software to detect the movements of the subjects drawing on the air in the same 3D coordinate were they perceive the phosphenes.With this new technique we introduce the component of depth of the visual space in the phosphenes mapping, a disregarded component in the old 2D techniques. No techniques in the past had this measurement in account but our results show that transcraneal magnetic stimulated subjects clearly perceived phosphenes at different depth locations (data not shown at this paper). Furthermore this new mapping technique has three main advantages: (i) it allows patients to locate phosphenes in the real 3D visual space were they perceive the phosphenes, (ii) allows a quantitative measurement of the area and shape of the phosphenes (iii) and avoid the interactions between external devices and patients in order to facilitate the performance to the low vision or blind individuals.
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Soto-Sanchez, C., Olmedo-Payá, A., de Santos-Sierra, D., Agullo, C., Fernández, E. (2013). A Novel Approach for Quantitative Analysis of 3D Phosphenes. In: Ferrández Vicente, J.M., Álvarez Sánchez, J.R., de la Paz López, F., Toledo Moreo, F.J. (eds) Natural and Artificial Models in Computation and Biology. IWINAC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7930. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38637-4_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38637-4_35
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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