Shared Sight

Why vision data

The tools that help people with low vision see more, such as scene description, obstacle warning and enhanced contrast, are built by training software on examples of what the world looks like from where a person stands. Most of the examples available to researchers were taken by cameras on cars and phones. Very few show the world as a person with an implant sees it: at eye height, moving as a head moves, indoors and in bad light.

Shared Sight lets implant wearers who choose to take part donate short, anonymised samples of what their implants process, so that researchers can build and test better tools. It is the only programme of its kind run by a charity rather than a manufacturer.

How it works

• You opt in through your implant’s settings or at an aftercare clinic, after reading the consent information in your own language. Nothing is collected until you do.
• Your implant removes your identity from each sample before it leaves the device. Samples are held at the Chiba Centre for Visual Science, not by the maker of your implant.
• Researchers apply to an independent data access committee. Each application is published, with the committee’s decision and reasons.
• You can stop donating at any time, and ask for everything you have donated to be deleted. We confirm deletion in writing within thirty days.

Other people

An implant sees what its wearer sees, and that includes other people. Shared Sight follows KF-OS 2, our bystander privacy standard: faces and other identifying features of people other than the wearer are blurred on the device before a sample is created, and samples recorded in schools, hospitals, places of worship and private homes other than the wearer’s own are not collected.