Research by British Universities can help to change lives

We are a world leading nation of innovators; winning 13 science Nobel Prizes since 2000 and with more Nobel Prizes per capita than US, France, Germany, Russia or Japan. The research conducted in UK universities tackles the biggest problems facing humankind today.

I’ve seen firsthand how research by British Universities can help to change lives. For the past five years, I’ve led a small research team based at Oxford University, which has developed a range of sight-enhancing wearable technologies. The “smart glasses” our team has been working on are designed to detect nearby objects such as faces, text and obstacles, and enhance them to the point that someone with even the smallest amount of vision can see and interact with them.

For over 300,000 people in the UK, and for as many as 40 million worldwide, blindness robs them of much of their independence and quality of life. For many people everyday tasks such as a recognising a face, reading text or walking in the dark is all but impossible.

Our research group launched a company, OxSight, to promote life changing smart glasses technologies that restore sight in many of the most challenging scenarios.

The device looks like a pair of sunglasses but behind the screens lie a camera, a computer and the latest machine learning algorithms that are able to detect and display objects instantly. These glasses have recently been successfully tested in a large UK-wide trial involving the Royal National Institute of Blind (RNIB) with funding from a Google Global Impact Challenge Award.

You can learn more about how they work:

This research has been supported since 2011 by the Department of Health through their NIHR i4i program. We’ve also been recipients of major awards from the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. Being based at the University of Oxford has allowed us to interact with world-leading computer scientists and eye specialists to develop artificially intelligent software into the smart glasses. A new company, OxSight Ltd, launched in June this year with investment from China to further develop the glasses and take them to market in early 2017.