Here’s a sight for poor eyes

Three years ago, Dr Stephen Hicks was being hailed as the man who would one day put the nation’s guide dogs for the blind out of work. It seemed a little fanciful to some.

But the idea of a pair of smart glasses, designed by this Oxford University researcher, being able to help the blind and partially sighted see, certainly gave hope of improved vision to millions of people.

For the high-tech specs he developed, packed with technology normally found in smartphones and game consoles, held the promise of delivering independence to people classified as blind.

Now it has emerged that Dr Hicks’s remarkable glasses could be on the market for the price of a mobile telephone this time next year.

The National Institute for Health Research set the project running four years ago with £650,000 backing and an anonymous individual invested another £500,000.

Now it has been announced that the Royal Academy of Engineers is to provide £85,000 in new funding.

The academy this month recognised Dr Hicks as one of the UK’s top seven most promising academic entrepreneurs, deserving support to take his work from the laboratory to the market place.

Dr Hicks, who works at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, said more valuable than the money was the mentoring and support the academy could now offer.

He said: “What is incredible is that they can connect us to leading men and women who have done these kind of things before so we get mentoring from them.”

Dr Hicks said he now hoped to be able to set up a private company within six months and begin manufacturing early next year.

Over years, Dr Hicks has maintained that the glasses could transform the quality of many, many lives, with more than 300,000 severely sight impaired people in the UK alone.

The glasses do not restore sight but enhance spatial awareness, allowing users to be more naturally aware of their surroundings.

The principle relies on the fact that a large proportion of people who are registered legally blind still have some residual sight.

The smart glasses consist of a video camera mounted on the frame of the glasses and a computer processing unit that is small enough to fit in a pocket.

Bryony Chinnery, spokesman for the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “One in every 300 people worldwide is classified as legally blind.

“Up to 90 per cent of these individuals have some remaining sight, called residual vision, which can be limited to just the awareness of light, shapes and motion.

“Stephen and his team have developed a non-invasive visual display that can be worn like glasses to enhance the usefulness of residual vision.

“The glasses work by detecting the three-dimensional structure of nearby objects and preferentially highlighting the nearest and most important objects, such as people, faces and obstacles.”

She said that up to now, assistive technologies for blind individuals had traditionally involved touch or sound devices, which were hard to learn and provided limited increases in quality of life and independence.

Ms Chinnery said: “Stephen is currently refining the prototype into a new lightweight pair of glasses, and a market-ready device is expected by the end of the year.

“It will initially be sold online and potentially made available on the high street in the future.

“The academy will continue to offer him mentoring and support over the coming years to accelerate the development of the underlying technology.”

The smart glasses fire out 30,000 beams of infrared light on to everything in front of the wearer.

A tiny embedded camera picks up all those dots and can tell how large they are and how widely they are spaced to build up a 3D picture.

It then shines the black-and-white image into the user’s eyes as an “overlay” on top of the real world.

Dr Hicks, 40, said: “Someone with macular degeneration will see a general grey smearing but if you shone a bright light in their vision they can detect it.

“You don’t need much information for your brain to make up an image.”

Similar projects in the past have enhanced the contrast in light levels to help people see. What we did, which was quite different, was to use a depth camera, the same type used in an Xbox,” he said.

“With depth you can separate out what you consider to be the most important thing from a busy background and it pops right out.”

He estimated the first pairs of smart glasses would cost about the same as a smartphone, in the region of £500.

Dr Hicks said: “Throughout 2015 we will be running a field trial which will provide information about how people are able to use the glasses in the real world going about their everyday lives.

“It presently involves about 250 people from Oxford, London and Peterborough.

“It will tell us whether it makes an actual difference to the quality of life and if there are real benefits in terms of communication and being able to see people’s faces better, for example.”

He believed the glasses could help up to 100,000 people, about a third of those in the UK classified as blind.

Dr Hicks, who leads a team of five based at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, hoped that later models of the glasses would enable the computer to be incorporated within the smart glasses themselves.

Dr Hicks, an Australian, had developed his interest in the technology at Sydney University.

Innovator: Dr Stephen Hicks

He recalled an early pilot study run with the help of the RNIB, involving people of all ages.

At the time he described his excitement to The Oxford Times: “All were able to complete our simple tasks and the majority could quickly and easily identify obstacles.

“Some users were able to see people up to five metres away. One participant was very surprised to see his own legs for the first time in years.

“And one man looked down at his guide dog and fondly said: ‘There you are girl’.”

Later, the trials moved to a converted warehouse in London where light levels could be controlled to simulate different times of the day and weather conditions.

However, he had strongly denied suggestions that the smart glasses might replace guide dogs.

“There will be scenarios where guide dogs will be better, such as leading the way to entry points and navigating complicated environments.”

They may not replace the guide dogs, but with the support of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the smart glasses certainly look set to give them a good run for their money.