A LAKE Macquarie man has modified a $10 web camera by adding lenses from $16 door viewers – commonly knows as peep-holes – to devise an affordable research tool to be used in the development of a new bionic eye.
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Barry Gow, 81, a retired cardiovascular physiologist, has spent seven years refining the opthalmological instrument in his home workshop at Wangi Wangi.
“It was developed here in Wangi Wangi, so I’ve called it the Wangiscope,” he said.
The instrument is an inexpensive alternative to a $50,000 fundus camera used by opthalmologists.
Wangiscopes are also relatively quick to make.
“I can make one in a few hours,” Mr Gow said.
And that includes the time it takes him to go to Bunnings to pick up the peep-holes.
After he retired from Sydney University in 1994, Mr Gow was appointed an honorary visiting associate professor at the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of NSW.
He then joined the university’s bionic eye team, led by professors Nigel Lovell and Gregg Suaning, and was tasked with solving a research problem.
“The offer of an opportunity to solve a problem in a research field as exciting as a bionic eye was too difficult to resist,” Mr Gow said.
Despite what television might have us believe, a bionic eye is not a replacement artificial eye, nor does it provide super vision.
It is, instead, a method of restoring rudimentary vision to people facing blindness due to retinitis pigmentosa.
It involves surgically inserting a thin strip of electrodes, known as an electrode array, into the eye, then electrically stimulating the surviving retinal cells.
“The problem the professors had was when they put an array into an eye, they couldn’t see it,” Mr Gow said.
Researchers need to know that arrays are placed in the correct spot, and that they don’t move over time.
Mr Gow discovered that shining an infrared LED (light-emitting diode) into the white of the eye (sclera) illuminated the inside of the organ, allowing the array to be clearly seen through the Wangiscope held against the cornea.