(430c) Organic Artificial Retina for Robotic Vision and Biomedical Devices

Retina is an important component of the human eye, enabling humans to acquire around 80% of information from their surroundings. Researchers have developed artificial retinas to mimic human vision functions to assist visually impaired individuals in biomedical applications as well as enable visual sensing in robotics. Current artificial retinas mostly rely on rigid silicon electronics, making non-invasive implantation and seamless interfacing with soft biological tissues challenging. They also usually rely on separate sensors, processors, and memory units to complete vision tasks, resulting in significantly higher energy consumption compared to human vision systems.

I will introduce an artificial retina based on organic optoelectronics. We demonstrated that an all organic-based artificial retina exhibited tissue-like softness, ensuring mechanical compatibility and allowing for seamless integration with biological tissues. I also showed that these devices operated based on mixed ionic-electronic conduction, where light manipulated ion insertion into the organic photoactive layer. This mechanism imitated the ion flux-driven synaptic activity in living systems, enhancing the communication of our device with human neurons. Finally, I demonstrated that this ion flux activity enabled the recognition of different optical signals and the mimicry of the learning processes of the human brain. By leveraging the integrated functions of perception, processing, and memorization of visual information, a single-layer organic synapse array was developed as an artificial retina, enabling face recognition without the need for a complex artificial neural network. Our work lays the foundation for future robotic vision and biomedical devices. It could also unlock opportunities for developing novel diagnostic and therapeutic devices to treat neural-visual diseases.

Reference:

1. Ke Chen, Inho Song, Liyan You, Jianguo Mei. Organic Iono-Optoelectronics: From Electrochromics to Artificial Retina. Acc. Chem. Res., 2025, 58, 24-35.
2. Ke Chen, Hang Hu, Inho Song, Habtom B. Gobeze, Won-June Lee, Ashkan Abtahi, Kirk Schanze, Jianguo Mei. Organic Optoelectronic Synapse Based on Photon-Modulated Electrochemical Doping. Nat. Photon., 2023, 17, 629-637.