com abdopublishing Publishing Abdo of imprint An Library MODERN ENGINEERING MARVELS BIONIC EYES Christine Checkerboard Zuchora-Walske
1 BIONIC EYES OF THE FUTURE It’s 6 00 a m It’s 6 00 a m Your talking alarm clock wakes you up You feel for the off button and press it Then you roll out of bed and get ready for school Even though you’re blind you can walk around your home quickly and easily Everything’s always in the same place But away from home you walk slowly holding a long white cane With it you feel for objects around you When the school bus arrives you find the bus steps with your cane and climb aboard As you ride you think about a new technology your parents told you about It’s an implant that could help blind people see You daydream about what that might be like One year later you’ve had the implant surgery Now you wear glasses Your glasses hold a tiny camera and computer The computer turns the camera’s images into electronic signals It sends the signals to a computer chip attached to your brain
In 2014 there were nearly 300 million visually impaired people around the world Your brain reads the signals and lets you know what is around you You can see The shapes you see are kind of fuzzy Everything looks black and white But you don’t need your cane anymore You can see well enough to walk without it
