Pieter Roelfsema receives HBP Innovation Award

During the final HBP Summit in Marseille, Prof. Pieter Roelfsema and his team won a HBP Innovation Award for their work on “The Brain Prosthesis for the Blind.” The innovation evaluation committee emphasised: “The innovations we selected all had high societal impact, and this impact could not have come about if the work was not of very high quality.”

The first 2023 Innovation Award went to Prof. Pieter Roelfsema (Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, NIN) and his team, for building a brain prosthetic device (with 1024 electrodes) to restore vision in people who have become blind later in life. The device is wirelessly connected to a wearable camera and implanted in the visual cortex, translating visual input into brain stimulation patterns that induce phosphenes, which are small, pixel-like dots in the visual field. Phosphenes induced via multiple electrodes can be used to create the perception of shapes and contours. Roelfsema’s group collaborates closely with both neurosurgeons and AI experts. After successfully demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in animal models, it is the group’s ambition to move into humans in the next years. In accepting the award, Roelfsema said: “I’m very grateful to the people of the HBP, who made this competition possible and whose help went far beyond only funding, in providing indispensable computational tools such as the virtual human brain atlas.”