An implant gives a blind person back some sight

A camera on a pair of glasses sends pictures to a grid of electrodes on the retina, and a person who had lost all useful sight sees spots of light again: enough to find a doorway, follow a line on the floor or tell where a window is. It is the first upgrade of a sense to go all the way from a laboratory to a device a doctor could prescribe. The device that got it there, the Argus II, was later taken off the market by its maker, which does not lower the stage: the ladder records the furthest a technology has reached.

What would count

A person with no useful vision, fitted with a device that sends signals to the retina or the optic nerve, can reliably tell the position of a light source or the outline of an object they could not see before, in a peer-reviewed trial; and a regulator has approved such a device for use outside a trial.

Who settles it: Peer-reviewed trial reports and the regulator's approval record (the United States Food and Drug Administration, or its equivalent elsewhere)

Where it stands

In clinical use. Reached on 13 February 2013, on the record of accessdata.fda.gov. Could move a stage within 1 to 5 years.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  Nothing in the window bears on the next rung, in wide use, which needs a counted population in the hundreds of thousands. The nearest news is older: the PRIMA retinal chip for dry macular degeneration reported its one-year trial result in the New England Journal of Medicine and has a European approval, with no United States approval; that is a second device on a rung this entry already holds, and PRIMA is a watch term worth adding.

Notes

The in-clinical-use record is the FDA's device database entry for its approval of the Argus II (Second Sight) for people with advanced retinitis pigmentosa under a humanitarian device exemption, decided on 13 February 2013 and announced the next day. The first-human record is the peer-reviewed report of the earlier Argus I, implanted in a volunteer in 2002 and published in 2003. Second Sight stopped making the Argus II around 2019 and later merged into another company; the entry stays tracked rather than withdrawn because the upgrade is the category, not one product, and newer retinal implants (for example PRIMA, a photovoltaic chip under the retina, with a trial report in 2025) are in human trials. The next rung, in wide use, would need a count of users in the thousands, which no retinal implant has reached.