ARIA Research Awarded $1.5M in Federal CTCM Funding For Breakthrough Bionic Vision System

Federal Minister for Health and Ageing, the Honourable Mark Butler MP, announces $1.5M CTCM Funding to Sydney-based ARIA Research to conduct a pilot clinical trial of its breakthrough non-invasive bionic vision system.

The ARIA Non-Invasive Bionic Vision System is a breakthrough wearable medical device that enables blind people to visualise their surroundings using sound, identifying and perceiving the location and details of objects, people and signs around them. ARIA is the world's first commercially-scalable non-invasive bionic vision system designed to deliver a comprehensive solution facilitating agency and independence for the 338 million people worldwide who are blind or low-vision.

Marx Melencio, ARIA’s first blind user says “ARIA is a game-changer. I can now go to a new place, glance around and immediately envision the layout of the environment and the objects and people in it.”  

ARIA’s revolutionary solution has grown out of a deep collaboration with the global blind community. “Since ARIA’s inception in 2019, we have been working with peak blind organisations and blind community leaders to co-design the solution they want, to the problems as they experience them”, says CEO of ARIA Research, Robert Yearsley. “Our blind co-design partners have reframed our thinking about the challenges of blindness - and thus, the solutions we are building -  from being a pathology of the eyes, to it being a problem of information access. We have heard from our blind colleagues around the world, ‘I am not broken - I don’t need to be fixed. I just need to be able to perceive what's around me, and then I’m fine.’  This insight has allowed ARIA, in 3 years, to leapfrog the implantable bionic eye efforts of the last 30 years."

“ARIA’s co-designed, non-invasive, information-delivery approach has already proven successful and useful in our early laboratory and real-world testing, with blind users able to identify and locate specific objects, achieve proprioceptive reach, wayfind and avoid obstacles. These early achievements already exceed the real-world capabilities of implanted bionic vision systems, which have been in development for three decades with no successful commercial products yet released. ARIA also appears to bypass key medical and physiological limitations of implanted devices observed in clinical trials; namely, surgical/medical risks and recovery, weeks or months of neuroplastic adaptation to achieve basic utility, and fatigue to the user. We haven’t observed these issues with ARIA”, says Yearsley. “The upcoming clinical trials supported by the CTCM funding will help formalise these observations, which are critical to validating a practical, and commercially scalable solution to living with blindness and low vision”.  

The backing of MTPConnect via the CTCM program will support the engagement of a contract research organisation (CRO), the design and manufacture of a revised ARIA prototype, development of clinical trial protocol and execution of the pilot clinical trial. The pilot will be conducted with a small cohort of blind participants to validate core medical claims and associated end points covering the utility, effectiveness and safety of the device.

“A key aim of this project is to support collaboration with the NDIS to validate the real-world potential of the technology to support fulfilment of participant goals, and by extension, lay the groundwork for a multi-billion dollar global health economic business case”, explains Yearsley. “We believe ARIA has a fundamentally sound approach to providing practical, life-changing value to Australia’s NDIS-supported blind and low-vision population as well as to an underserved global market of hundreds of millions of people."

"ARIA is Australian conceived, headquartered, and designed, and is to be trialled and manufactured in our backyard", says Yearsley.  "We see the opportunity to build a new generation of globally-focused medtech companies out of Sydney that can leverage our unique strengths of cutting-edge research and engineering capability, with a straightforward path to market via the world's largest and most concentrated disability consumer marketplace, the NDIS. As such, we’re opening an investment round today to support commercialisation of the technology.”

Media Contact: Mark Harrison, Chief Product Officer: mark@ariaresearch.com.au

Investment Contact: Robert Yearsley, CEO robert@ariaresearch.com.au

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