Autonomous Vehicles & The Visually Impaired W/ Dr. Phillip Hessburg | Episode #16
Episode 16
Autonomous Vehicles & The Visually Impaired W/ Dr. Phillip Hessburg
Dr. Phillip Hessburg is an authority on driverless automobiles, and this episode is all about what artificial vision in automobiles means for the visually impaired community. Interestingly, Dr. Hessburg was also on the organization of Retinopathy prematurity, associate Retinal Disease Board for many years, and he has a long history with our organization.
This episode dives into the future of mobility for the visually impaired and is a fantastic preview of technology that has the potential to transform the lives of many.
-
0:00:10.1 Dr. Droste: Good evening and welcome world. This is Dr. Patrick Droste for the Pediatric Retinal Research Foundation, Through Our Eyes podcast. And we have the tremendous privilege tonight of having Dr. Philip Hessburg work with us on a podcast. We will have a full biography on Dr. Hessburg put in one of our sightline articles in the future. We know that he's a great authority on driverless automobiles, and artificial vision for automobiles, and it isn't always been that way. I will also mention that Dr. Hessburg was on the Organization of Retinopathy of Prematurity Associated Retinal Disease Board for many years, actually before I joined, and he has a long history with our organization. But Dr. Hessburg, why don't you kind of tell us that after you graduated from medical school, did a year at Henry Ford, and were planned and were programmed to become a urologist, but you had a commitment to the US military, and that involved being a flight surgeon and that changed your perspective. Could you share that with us, please?
0:01:14.2 Dr. Hessburg: Well, following my internship, I went into the Air Force. At that time, there was a shortage of physicians and I chose the Air Force. I was lucky enough to be selected to go to the flight school and the flight surgeon school was in Texas at Randolph Air Force Base, and there, I was exposed to the wonderful world of the eye and vision and I became enchanted with ophthalmology. And in the three years that I was in the Air Force, I finally made the decision to leave urology and go into ophthalmology. And following that, I came back to Detroit and took a four-year residency in ophthalmology at the Henry Ford Hospital under Jack Smallwood Guyton. So the Air Force was one of those experiences that put me in a better path.
0:02:14.2 DD: Tell us how when you were with the pilots and flying with them, that you noticed that many of the pilots who were World War II veterans and were getting a little older and maybe didn't have quite the vision that some of the younger ones did, but they were better pilots. Can you elaborate on that?
0:02:34.2 DH: Well, I can. In the Air Force, I became convinced that the important role of the brain is to fly the airplanes and that vision plays a secondary role. That made a big difference to me because in the Air Force, as a flight surgeon, I had to examine a lot of the youngsters who were then going to the new Air Force Academy in Colorado. And it bothered me a great deal to see a young man whose academic portfolio was superb, but maybe had a small degree of myopia, which dropped his vision down a line or two on the chart. And that young person would be rejected by the Air Force. And I think that I was convinced even then that the important pilots learned to trust their instruments and not to depend on their eyesight. So why that was such a big role then, and frankly now, bothers me. It bothers me, especially with automobile drivers. Cognition, we now know, plays a much bigger role than vision does. But that was the history of my change of life in the Air Force, Dr. Droste.
0:04:01.8 DD: So that's just a fascinating segue because here we have something that happened many years ago. And when you were starting your career, but you noticed a certain correlation between skill and managing or flying an airplane and now an automobile. So that's going to bring us to The Eye & The Auto, which later became The Eye, The Brain & The Auto. And that has been around for 20 years or more, correct?
0:04:29.7 DH: That's exactly right.
0:04:30.9 DD: Right. Can you tell us a little bit about how that evolved?
0:04:34.1 DH: Sure. In 1949, Harold Ridley in Europe, in London, invented the interocular lens. And then after many years, some physicians here in the United States, Jared Emery and Doug Koch and Dr. Welsh in Florida, invented the cataract congresses. And with the cataract congress, they invited everybody who was tinkering around with interocular lens implants to attend that congress. And that model of inviting a group of speakers, giving them a long period of time to make their presentations, and then a very solid and timed challenge period, that appealed to me greatly. So when the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology was looking for a research project, the model for the congresses, which had been established for the cataract congresses appealed to me.
0:05:38.2 DH: It appealed to me because when we started the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology, which was in 1972, we thought that we would continue the research project that we had going at Henry Ford Hospital. That didn't happen because after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson became the president. Lyndon Johnson had four major heart attacks before the one that caused his demise. And the cardiovascular research suddenly dominated the NIH. So that there were a lot of people like us whose projects were approved, my project related to the cytology or the cells present in the aqueous of patients with uveitis. So what happened was a lot of us had our research projects approved but not funded. And when that happened, I was forced to let solid researchers, Lloyd Hutchinson, Pat McDade, and several others in the research lab go. And I swore I would never again depend on the NIH for research funding.
0:07:00.6 DH: In the institute then, we decided to try the research congress route, and we studied about 10 different ideas, Dr. Droste, and we finally settled on two. One of them was on the relationship between vision and driving, and we called that The Eye & The Auto and the second congress related to the development of visual neuro-prosthetic devices to implant in the eye or the brain of people who were totally blind, to allow them to recover some level of useful vision. We call that congress The Eye & The Chip, and we'll be doing that again this coming October. I think that the reason for the success of those congresses was sort of serendipitous. What happened was the board of directors of the institute spent a lot of time looking at the literature and trying to figure out, after we had decided on vision and driving and neuro-prosthetic devices, we tried to figure out who in the United States we could inveigle to be the co-organizer of the congresses.
0:08:15.3 DH: And relative to The Eye & The Auto, we kept coming back to a researcher, Dr. Cynthia Owsley at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. She is a professor of ophthalmology, although she is a PhD, but 20 years ago and today as well, she is the leading expert in the world on the relationship between vision and driving. And so we flew down to Birmingham and we talked her into co-organizing The Eye & The Auto. And she has co-organized all of them, every other year since then. She's still the backbone. If you talk to anybody in Washington or in driving vision research, Cynthia Owsley is the leading authority.
0:09:08.2 DD: Well, that kind of brings us to the next question, and it's kind of natural, it started with The Eye & The Auto and then The Eye, The Brain & The Auto. Can you tell us a little bit about how it kind of became an international congress over the years?
0:09:23.1 DH: Well, right, that goes back as I said, that the cataract congresses of Dr. Welsh in Florida, and that is with a research congress, you don't just give the investigator, say six minutes and one minute of discussion, each of the people around the world that you select and in a congress you select about 30, you offer to cover much of their expenses because many of them are not the chairman of the department. And so travel is not automatically covered. So it's very important that in the room you have about 30 of the leading authorities, and then you give each of those authorities 20 minutes presentation, which as you know for many academy meetings, that's a long presentation before the whole academy. Often they're six or eight minutes long with one minute of discussion. But in a congress, each of those invited speakers is given 20 minutes, and then there's a 10-minute challenge period.
0:10:29.1 DH: The importance of a research congress is that the other 29 or 30 speakers are encouraged to challenge the research of the presenter. And in a 10-minute challenge period, it is very difficult to hide. If you are fuzzy about your data or about your research, they'll uncover it in a congress. Whereas you can usually get by in many meetings by simply talking over the question period and going on to the next speaker. That doesn't happen in a research congress. There's a timer and the speaker is challenged and it develops a certain collegiality among the members of the congress. And what we feel is that collegiality accelerates collaboration. And as you, as a physician know, collaboration accelerates results with progress.
0:11:37.3 DD: I did have the privilege of attending two year congresses, one on The Eye & The Chip, and one more recently on The Eye & The Auto. And I was absolutely astounded by the candor of the people who challenge the presenters on their data. I mean, this is what really makes it a congress and not just a meeting or a symposium.
0:12:00.4 DH: Yeah. Yes. You're completely right.
0:12:02.2 DD: So that was one of our questions, why we call it a congress. I think you've answered that extremely well. I wanna go a little bit to the driverless auto thing, which has been a really big issue both for us as physicians, but also as visually challenged people. And as you know, for industry, for example, the trucking industry is very interested in the driverless trucks so that they can be piloted without having the mandatory eight hour breaks and so on. And I think the technology for driverless trucks overlaps with driverless autos and semi-autonomous vehicles. Maybe you could tell us the difference between a semi-autonomous vehicle and an autonomous vehicle.
0:12:46.1 DH: Well, let's start with the Society of Automotive Engineers, the SAE. So the SAE determined there are five levels of progress between a vehicle which has no driver assisting systems and full autonomous mobility. So at level zero, you have a car which has no cruise control or any other form of assistance. At Level 1, you get cruise control and perhaps maybe one or two other assistive systems. By Level 2, 3, and 4, the number of these assistive systems gets to the point where at Level 4, the driver of the vehicle or the pilot of the vehicle has to be in the vehicle sitting, such that he can take over control of the vehicle. But there are enough assistive devices, lane control systems, and physician wellbeing systems that look at the driver and find out if he's drowsy or been drinking, and lane control systems, which let the driver know that he's leaving a lane, or automatic braking systems that force the vehicle to slow down when it approaches a vehicle ahead of it. As these systems have progressed, the central processing unit of the vehicle becomes more and more complex, because today the semi-autonomous vehicles have RADAR systems, which as you know, is very high frequency radial waves, and they have LiDAR, which are laser-assisted systems.
0:14:49.5 DH: So the new vehicles, the Ford F-150 will have four camera systems and in addition, it will have RADAR and LiDAR systems. The Tesla vehicle to the best of my knowledge, depends on camera systems rather than on RADAR and LiDAR. But each of these systems gathers all sorts of data which has to be evaluated. So there is the constant pouring in of data into the central processing unit, which has to make decisions. And that now feeds us into the AI, the artificial intelligence world, because if the camera looking forward, sees a ball roll out into the street, artificial intelligence knows that it's probably gonna be followed by a child. And similarly, if you are up around Mancelona, Michigan, and a deer runs across your pathway, the chances are excellent that there's another deer coming. So those are instances in which artificial intelligence feeds into autonomous mobility.
0:16:03.7 DH: When you get to Level 5, SAE Level 5, that means that the car is totally wired, such that there's no necessity for a driver. So you can conceive of it, Dr. Droste, as a box that has in it, no steering wheel, no brakes. And you'll get in and say, "I wanna go to Henry Ford Hospital, 2799, West Grand Boulevard." And this box takes you there. That's full autonomous mobility and that is what the trucking industry wants and needs. The trucking industry wants to be able to load a semi-trailer with lettuce in San Jose, California, and deliver it in New York City, without waiting for rest periods. So the trucking industry has been a huge factor in pushing electric vehicles and electric vehicles feed into autonomous mobility. It's probably possible to take an internal combustion engine and put all of these systems into it, but I don't think any car company that I know of is doing that. All of them are developing electric vehicles, battery-driven vehicles before they go to full autonomous mobility.
0:17:32.8 DD: All right, so that was one of our other questions. Do you feel that the technology for driverless or autonomous vehicles and the technology for electric vehicles, do you feel that there's kind of a dovetail or a segue between the two? You just mentioned that you didn't think that driverless vehicles would be applied to internal combustion. Was there a particular reason for that?
0:17:58.9 DH: Not that I know of, but I'm not an authority in the automotive world. I could... I had a recent long visit with the research department of one of the big three, and I didn't ask that question.
0:18:10.9 DD: Okay. All right. But it seems that there is kind of a dovetail movement between... Interlocking movement between autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles.
0:18:23.0 DH: Yes.
0:18:23.6 DD: And I think that kind of makes sense. But what I have a hard time understanding is how does... Let's just say four people want to go to Henry Ford Hospital and they have this vehicle that can take all four of them to the hospital for visits. Somebody has to program the vehicle, somebody has to be able to turn it on or turn it off if there's a problem. How is that regulated?
0:18:47.9 DH: There are much more sophisticated GPS systems than the first GPS system that you can remember, which got you in the general neighborhood of where you were trying to go. Now they talk about GPS systems in terms of centimeters. So this allows tremendous accuracy in these vehicles. If you take the millions of miles now that have been driven by autonomous vehicles as test vehicles, the incidents of highway deaths with autonomous vehicles can be shown to be far lower than it is with visions piloted by a driver. And so we're going to get autonomous mobility probably because we want it, because whether we want it or not, for a lot of reasons, one of them is that we simply can't afford the crashes that we have. We can't afford to lose 43,000 people on our highways every year.
0:19:54.1 DH: And we know that autonomous mobility will reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities and will significantly reduce the number of pedestrian vehicles. If I remember correctly, of the 43,000 most recent tabulated vehicle crashes, I think 13,000 of them involved pedestrians. Well, an autonomous vehicle with RADAR or LiDAR and cameras is going to spot that warm body even if you driving home from a terribly long day, seeing patients might miss it.
0:20:35.2 DD: Well, that's extraordinary. One of the things that came up in our group is, how does the small visually impaired community in the United States fit into this dynamic? We're a small population, but could you talk a little bit about that and why they're interested in the visually impaired?
0:21:00.4 DH: Sure. I think that the visually impaired have made a very strong statement from many different organizations that we want to regain mobility. As you can remember, in your training as a resident ophthalmologist, the terrible pain that we go through when somebody's vision falls below the state requirements. And the state requirements have literally no relationship between mortality and the acuity of the driver. Although we take some person like your mother, and we say to her, "Okay, your vision has dropped down one line below the allowable limits in the state of Michigan, and so you're not going to be able to drive anymore." Well, the minute you do that, Dr. Droste, what you're doing is you're taking an elderly woman who's fully mobile and you're saying to her, "Okay, as of tomorrow, you're totally dependent on your daughter or your neighbor or someone else." So you're denying that person the independents that came with a driver's license.
0:22:09.0 DH: And if you take a look at the highway statistics, elderly women, and elderly gentlemen don't drive the miles they did before. So they're not the killers on the highway. The killers on the highway, to a large extent, are young people oftentimes who have been drinking and driving and are out very late and kill people on the highway. It's not the little old lady who wants to grow to Kroger's or St. Clair Church or the beauty parlor. She doesn't kill people.
0:22:41.4 DD: No.
0:22:43.3 DH: Even if her vision is way below the allowable limits. I'll give you a good example. When we allow people to drive with bioptic systems, that is, if you take a pair of glasses and right up in the corner of it, you mount a little telescope, okay?
0:23:00.4 DD: Right.
0:23:00.4 DH: And you go to the Secretary of State's office and they put up the 2040 line and you crack your head until you've got that line in the telescope, you can read it, 428356. Okay. You just passed it with this little telescope, but that's not what you drive with. You drive with the carrier lenses. So we know that all kinds of people are driving with vision which approaches legal blindness without causing any mayhem on the highway. But the fact of the matter is, if you give them this artificial system, they can use it to read the eye chart and some of it will use it to tell whether or not a light is red or green, but they don't drive with it. They drive with the carrier lens with which their vision is far below the legal limit in the State of Michigan.
0:23:53.5 DD: And they drive safely. And they drive safely. And the other thing, the visual field that's associated with a telescope is one fraction of what's needed to drive safely is less than 10 degrees.
0:24:03.6 DH: Try walking around your house looking through a telescope.
0:24:06.7 DD: Right. Yeah. Well, so it does... Bioptics do get people into the vehicles and on the roads and in a safe fashion. But as you pointed out, it's not because they see 2040, it's because the vision they do have is good enough for them to drive safely.
0:24:24.1 DH: Yes. But even...
0:24:25.2 DD: All right. Go ahead. I didn't mean to...
0:24:27.0 DH: But even with patients who have a visual field defect, say a patient with a hemianopsia, a patient with half of the vision in each eye. Those patients can be taught to use the half of vision in each eye to drive safely by constantly changing their angle of gaze. And so amazingly, some of those patients drive a great deal.
0:24:54.3 DD: Now let's get back to the auto. Let's say we have four people that want to go to Ford Hospital and they're all visually impaired and they have this vehicle that has been developed for them.
0:25:05.4 DH: Oh no. This vehicle which is developed for the general population, which will greatly benefit the visually impaired in that job.
0:25:14.4 DD: Okay. So it's a vehicle, it's developed for the general population.
0:25:19.3 DH: Absolutely.
0:25:20.4 DD: But there's no driver and no controller. So what... Is it just by voice command that goes where you tell it?
0:25:27.0 DH: It's essentially the same thing as an Uber driver.
0:25:30.4 DD: As an Uber or Ways. Yeah.
0:25:32.2 DH: What's the very big difference? The very big difference is the Uber has got a driver in it. And the driver, as you know, the wrecks that occur on the highway are about 94% pilot error.
0:25:47.2 DD: Yes.
0:25:47.5 DH: So right. So when you're driving with an Uber driver, he may be safer than you are because you've been drinking Martinis at dinner, but he's just another driver on the road and he's subject to crash statistics which are much less promising than a fully autonomous vehicle.
0:26:09.5 DD: So the vehicles are being developed for the general public, but that includes the visually impaired.
0:26:16.2 DH: And for the military.
0:26:17.8 DD: And for the military.
0:26:19.3 DH: Right.
0:26:19.7 DD: All right. So they're not being developed just for the visually impaired, they're being enveloped for a large audience, which is large enough to pay for the cost. In other words, if we just can sign these to the visually impaired, there wouldn't be a big enough hand value to pay for the cost of the research or the production.
0:26:38.2 DH: Yes, that's correct, Dr. Droste.
0:26:40.7 DD: Where do you think right now is a center point for development of these of these vehicles in the world?
0:26:48.0 DH: Well, when we started thinking about The Eye, The Brain & The Auto, and we started looking into it, we found out that we could not find a single OEM, originally equipment manufacturer, car builder in the Orient in Europe or in the United States who wasn't working on electric vehicles and had a skunk works working on autonomous mobility. So they are all heavily involved in it.
0:27:16.9 DD: So this is something that's gonna come to fruition within the next decade or less?
0:27:23.7 DH: I don't wanna put years on it. You have... That's a legitimate one.
0:27:27.8 DD: Yeah.
0:27:28.4 DH: Some people were saying earlier than that there are some systems around the United States where there are autonomous mobility, autonomous vehicles, especially in closed map situations. So if you take a very large campus, Michigan State is a huge campus. But if you take several huge campuses, they already have autonomous level five boxes driving all over the campus, depositing children from classroom to classroom.
0:28:00.3 DD: See, I didn't know that, but I do see similar types of devices in hospitals, in airports and other places delivering cargo. Not people so much, but cargo from point A to point B with minimal interruption or problems with safety. One of the things that fascinated me by the meeting that we attended in November is there was a researcher from Toronto who gave a Zoom talk on vertigo and seasickness in visually impaired drivers or visually impaired people in autonomous vehicles. And I couldn't understand why they just had the seasickness, the vertigo in autonomous vehicles and didn't have it in regular vehicles when they drive. Can you elaborate on that at all?
0:28:47.3 DH: No, no, I can't. But I also know that they have the same sickness in training system. So if you put a patient who is subject to vertigo and nausea and motion sickness into a...
0:29:06.6 DD: Simulator?
0:29:07.3 DH: Yeah, simulator. Yeah. Some patients will become very sick. We had that same problem when we were at Randolph Air Force Base. There were some flight surgeons who washed out because they became so airsick in B-47s. So I can't answer how you get past that.
0:29:30.5 DD: Do you think that that is more common in visually impaired than the general public or it just happened to be in certain people that he studied?
0:29:40.3 DH: I don't know. It's probably more common because one of the ways that we know you can handle it is, if you start reading in your car and you get the feeling that you're gonna be sick, your stomach, if you look outside and concentrate on the horizon, usually that feeling will pass. So the blind and visually impaired can't do that very efficiently.
0:30:04.6 DD: Right, right.
0:30:05.8 DH: But I don't know whether it's more common or not.
0:30:08.3 DD: Well, one of the questions that we had is, what is the advantage of a driverless or autonomous vehicle for me to get the point A to point B when I can take an Uber or a Lyft?
0:30:19.2 DH: I just thought I might have addressed that. And that is that ultimately a driverless vehicle is going to be safer by far than a vehicle with a driver in it. And all the Uber vehicles have drivers in them. So one of the downsides of the autonomous mobility revolution is that drivers will lose their jobs. You don't need taxi cab drivers, you don't need Uber drivers, you don't need truck drivers if we have gone to an autonomous mobility world.
0:31:01.0 DD: Well, that certainly puts a different drift on things. Right now I think the current thing is, do I wanna make the move from an internal combustion type of vehicle to an electric vehicle? And they're all the pros and cons of that. To me, the big disadvantage that I see of the electric vehicles in the current is one, they have limited distance, and two, they always have to be charged. If they're not running, they have to be charged. And sometimes that's hard to do, the least of which it's an inconvenience.
0:31:32.5 DH: Yes.
0:31:33.9 DD: So I think many of those issues are also gonna be with autonomous vehicles 'cause they're all electric base and they're gonna require batteries and put a huge demand on raw materials.
0:31:45.5 DH: That's absolutely true.
0:31:47.2 DD: All right. One of the questions that came up from one of our visually challenged members on the committee was, "I have limited amounts of money that I can spend. I don't quite understand the cost-benefit ratio for me to look into one, not necessarily buy an autonomous vehicle, but to get involved in a carpool with an autonomous vehicle or something like that." Do you have any comments on that? How can this benefit blind young adults in one question mark, how can this benefit blind young adults?
0:32:18.7 DH: It will benefit blind young adults when it also benefits the general population.
0:32:26.2 DD: If there's one thing that this podcast has in my opinion, really brought home is the main efforts of the driverless is not for the visually impaired or the handicap, although they will definitely be able to benefit from it. But it's for the general population and for the safety of the general population.
0:32:47.6 DH: That's right.
0:32:47.8 DD: And for the reduction of automobile crashes and so on.
0:32:50.7 DH: And to save billions and billions of dollars in healthcare costs and in auto repairs.
0:32:56.8 DD: But why do you say auto repairs? Because these things are mechanical and they'll still need to be... They'll break down.
0:33:02.6 DH: Yeah. The mechanical systems are infinitely simpler in an electric vehicle than in an internal combustion engine. Incidentally simpler.
0:33:12.2 DD: Well, I think that that would be very good. Is there anything that we haven't asked you tonight that you feel you would like to share?
0:33:21.8 DH: You had a pretty good list there, Dr. Droste.
0:33:24.5 DD: I did.
0:33:25.5 DH: I think one of the things if we... I don't know how much time we spent on this, I don't know where we are.
0:33:33.1 DD: We're 44 minutes.
0:33:34.6 DH: 44 minutes?
0:33:36.2 DD: Mm-hmm.
0:33:36.9 DH: One of the things I think that we did discuss was the research work of Dr. Timo Tervo in Finland. And I think that's an astounding piece of research. And it's an astounding piece of research because as an ophthalmologist, he decided to learn what role vision played in vehicle mortality. And so he created a research project in which he got to investigate the medical situation of every single road fatality in Finland. So if you die in a car crash as the driver in Finland, Timo Tervo and his team are gonna look into why you died. And what's very, very interesting is that cardiovascular problems and cortical vascular problems, cerebrovascular problems play a huge role. Suicide plays a huge role.
0:34:38.9 DH: What plays a very, very small role is vision. Probably less than one and a half percent of vehicle car crashes which result in mortality have any relationship to the driver's vision. So the only thing we test for in the Secretary of State's Office is whether or not your vision is competent. But we don't have a cognitive test and we don't test any other system. We only check to see what your vision was. So, Timo Tervo, I think his technology is disruptive technology. It changes everything you think about motor vehicle crashes.
0:35:23.2 DH: So that research to me certainly opened my eyes to the fact that why are we gonna call the congress The Eye & The Auto when cognition plays such a huge role compared to vision. And cognition, of course, feeds into the Timo Tervo work. If you have a cerebrovascular problem, chances are good that your cognition goes downhill. But today, if we have an elderly gentleman and his wife has to lead him into the Secretary of State's Office and tell him where to sit down and tell him when to stand up and walk over to the desk and tells him, "Here Charlie, read this line." He can read the line perfectly, but he doesn't know whether he is on foot or horseback.
0:36:14.6 DH: He gets a license. So the failure of the Secretary of State system to look into the problems relative to cognition, I think it's a terrible failing on the part of our motor vehicle departments. And there are simple tests. You can draw a clock test, you can draw a circle, put a 12 at the top, and then tell the person, "Okay, put in the numbers of the clock." And if you do that, Dr. Droste, it'll probably take 12 seconds, maybe 10. But if somebody comes in who's cognitively diminished and it takes them 15 minutes to figure out where the hours of the clock are, that patient has got a cognitive problem. And what should happen then is, I don't say that they should be denied a license, but I think that they should have an in-person road test, and we don't do anywhere enough of those. Instead of taking people's licenses away for whatever reason, as physicians, we ought to recommend, in-person driving test by the Secretary of State's Office.
0:37:28.7 DD: So do you think a driverless vehicle would be something useful for that person seeing that they don't have to drive it, but they could still get from point?
0:37:37.6 DH: Absolutely.
0:37:38.3 DD: All right. So...
0:37:39.3 DH: If two cognitive people can sit down in the airplane and end up in Tampa, Florida.
0:37:45.4 DD: Do you think that this in the next 10 years is gonna become something available to the public or do you think it's gonna be by transportation agencies like truckers or cabs or mass transit?
0:37:58.5 DH: I didn't use to think it would catch on for the general public, but I think that the general public is going to adopt it, and it may adopt it by fiat, some states may require it. Some states that are punitive like California may adopt it earlier than other states. But I think the time is gonna come when we just can't take the deaths on the highway anymore.
0:38:25.3 DD: So in your mind, this is what Elon Musk tried to do and he had a high number of crashes with individual drivers. Do you have... Which setback his research and his production plans quite a bit. Do you have any comments on that?
0:38:38.9 DH: I think there are better systems than the Tesla system. And I think that all three of the big three here in Michigan believe that their systems are infinitely better than the Tesla system. And secondly, despite the fact that there were some accidents with Teslas, the number of patients killed in Tesla vehicles was way lower than would've been if all of those vehicles had been driven by a pilot or an operator. If you take the miles... Patrick, if you take the miles driven...
0:39:14.3 DD: Yeah.
0:39:14.8 DH: The miles traversed in a Tesla vehicle and take and compare it to the same number of miles in a driven vehicle, the number of people who die in Teslas is far lower than it is in a vehicle piloted by a human being.
0:39:35.2 DD: So that answers about the next question. What are the biggest challenges in development of autonomous vehicles for USA and the world? What do you think are the biggest challenges?
0:39:44.1 DH: Well, I don't know. We're gonna solve the materials problem. Where are we gonna get the rare earths, the rare metals? Are we gonna look at the sources of vessel of mines in some foreign countries that mine rare earths that have child labor deep in unsafe mines? Are we going to continue to have to take a rare earth and ship them to China to be processed? How are we gonna get the materials necessary for the battery plants that we're building, not only here in Michigan, but elsewhere? The supply chain is what worries off an awful lot of people who are in this world.
0:40:26.6 DD: Well, I agree with that and I think that's the part of the ecology coin. It just doesn't get flipped over for inspection. Everything is based on carbon neutrality and emissions versus non-emissions. And they're looking at the tremendous cost to mine these rare earth elements to build these batteries. And then what do you do once they're dead? Where do you put them? It's very hard now to just get Alkaline batteries in a proper disposable place or Lead acid batteries.
0:40:56.4 DH: And not only that, but say these vehicles are increasingly efficient, but they still have to have electricity and they've gotta get it from electricity plants. And here we in the United States are saying we can't build any more nuclear power plants. So in much of the world, we still have coal-generating electricity. Some countries like Norway and some others are totally dependent now on nuclear power plants which infinitely more rewarding relative to the climate than our power plants.
0:41:37.0 DD: Yes, sir. Well, this has been an extraordinary session and we've touched on a lot of things. I think will cause a lot of interest from a lot of sectors. Luisa, do we have anybody with a question for Dr. Hessburg? No? Okay. Well, I'm sure there'll be plenty of questions after this gets delivered and we can't thank you enough, Dr. Hessburg, for your time. We will give you feedback on this and we will certainly get you a chance to listen to it yourself.
0:42:04.5 DH: Sure.
0:42:05.0 DD: But I think we've got a lot of work to do and we'll continue working on that. You and I are working on the driverless thing and we're also working on the autonomous vehicle thing for our patients.
0:42:17.6 DH: Sure. Thank you.
0:42:17.7 DD: So thank you very much. Thank you very much on behalf of the PRF and our board and Through Our Eyes Podcast. And Dr. Trese who was up there smiling on us.
0:42:28.3 DH: Yes, he is.
0:42:28.7 DD: All right. Take care and goodnight. And God bless you. Thank you.
0:42:33.5 DH: Thank you.
0:42:34.5 DD: Make sure to like and follow our Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and let us know whether you have any questions or have a topic you would like us to cover. We have tremendous things planned and we hope you tune in again for our next podcast. This is Dr. Droste saying, night to all of you. On behalf of our staff, the PRRF, thank you.
Show Notes:
Philip Charles HessburG, MD
The Eye, The Brain & The Auto: Autonomous Mobility
In this video, Dr. Philip Hessburg explains the impact that autonomous mobility technology will have upon healthcare.
The Eye and the Chip: 13th World Research Congress on Artificial Vision - October 8-10, 2023
The Eye and The Chip is a research congress that seeks to marry the most recent advances in nanoelectronics and neurobiology – to provide artificial vision to many people who are now blind as a result of many eye conditions, diseases, and injuries. Results from the congress will advance the day when many persons now blind recover some level of useful vision. At this collaborative event, the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology brings together more than 30 authorities from various vision science and technology fields.