# Environmental Localization Mapping and Guidance for Visual Prosthesis Users

> **NIH NIH R01** · JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $662,134

## Abstract

Project Summary
About 1.3 million Americans aged 40 and older are legally blind, a majority because of diseases
with onset later in life, such as glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration. Second Sight
has developed the world's first FDA approved retinal implant, Argus II, intended to restore some
functional vision for people suffering from retinitis pigmentosa (RP).
In this era of smart devices, generic navigation technology, such as GPS mapping apps for
smartphones, can provide directions to help guide a blind user from point A to point B. However,
these navigational aids do little to enable blind users to form an egocentric understanding of the
surroundings, are not suited to navigation indoors, and do nothing to assist in avoiding
obstacles to mobility. The Argus II, on the other hand, provides blind users with a limited visual
representation of their surroundings that improves users' ability to orient themselves and
traverse obstacles, yet lacks features for high-level navigation and semantic interpretation of the
surroundings. The proposed research aims to address these limitations of the Argus II through a
synergy of state-of-the-art stimultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and object
recognition technologies. For the past three years, JHU/APL has collaborated with Second
Sight to develop similar advanced vision-based capabilities for the Argus II, including
capabilities for object recognition and obstacle detection by stereo vision.
This proposal is driven by the hypothesis that navigation for users of retinal prosthetics can be
greatly improved by incorporating SLAM and object recognition technology conveying
environmental information via a retinal prosthesis and auditory feedback. SLAM enables the
visual prosthesis system to construct a map of the user's environment and locate the user within
that map. The system then provides object location and navigational cues via appropriate
sensory modalities enabling the user to mentally form an egocentric map of the environment.
We propose to develop and test a visual prosthesis system which 1) constructs a map of
unfamiliar environments and localizes the user using SLAM technology 2) automatically
identifies navigationally-relevant objects and landmarks using object recognition and 3) provides
sensory feedback for navigation, obstacle avoidance, and object/landmark identification.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10019559
- **Project number:** 5R01EY029741-02
- **Recipient organization:** JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Seth D Billings
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $662,134
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-09-30 → 2023-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10019559

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10019559, Environmental Localization Mapping and Guidance for Visual Prosthesis Users (5R01EY029741-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10019559. Licensed CC0.

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