AOP clinical and professional director, Dr Peter Hampson, and head of clinical negligence, Efa Schmidt, discussed safe practice and developments in artificial intelligence technology in their presentation The good, the bad and the ugly at 100% Optical (London ExCel, 23-25 April). Schmidt shared with the audience that her role involves overseeing clinical negligence claims at the AOP. "One of the issues that we find causes great concern amongst optometrists is the fear of litigation," she said. Schmidt added that sometimes optometrists can be fearful that their practice will be judged by a higher standard than is applied. She noted that optometrists are expected to act in a way that is reasonable, taking the same steps that the majority of other optometrists would take.

The patient pauses, recognizes the shape, then points to it with her finger. What she's doing is remarkable, not for what she remembers, but for how well she remembers. On average, she and seven other test subjects perform 37 percent better at the memory game with the brain pulses than they do without--making them the first humans on Earth to experience the memory-boosting benefits of a tailored neural prosthesis. If you want to get technical, the brain-booster in question is a "closed-loop hippocampal neural prosthesis." Closed loop because the signals passing between each patient's brain and the computer to which it's attached are zipping back and forth in near-real-time.