From today, adult wearers of compatible optical implants can choose to donate anonymised samples of what their implants see to research on low vision, through a new programme called Shared Sight.
Researchers building tools to help people with low vision see more, such as scene description and obstacle warning, have very few examples of the world as it looks from an implant at eye height. Shared Sight will collect such examples, with donors’ consent, and make them available to research projects approved by an independent data access committee.
Donation is opt-in and can be stopped at any time, with deletion of everything donated. Samples are anonymised on the implant before they leave it and held by the Foundation’s Chiba Centre for Visual Science, not by any maker. A data ethics board, with a majority of members from outside the Foundation and Kiroshi Opticals, oversees the programme.
Shared Sight follows the draft of KF-OS 2: faces of people other than the donor are blurred on the device, and nothing recorded in schools, hospitals, places of worship or other people’s homes is collected.