A visual prosthesis apparatus and a method for limiting power consumption ina visual prosthesis apparatus. The visual prosthesis apparatus comprises acamera for capturing a video image, a video processing unit associated with thecamera, the video processing unit configured to convert the video image to stimulationpatterns, and a retinal stimulation system configured to stop stimulating neuraltissue in a subject's eye based on the stimulation patterns when an erroris detected in a forward telemetry received from the video processing unit.
