While the eyes may not be the windows of the soul, they are a valuable indicator of health and by incorporating smart technology into contacts, may be able not only to help correct eye conditions, but display information back to the wearer.
The Economist reports on a number of developments in the slightly queasy world of sticking smart things in your eye.
The first smart contact lenses are already on the market. The Triggerfish, created by Sensimed, a spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is a wirelessly powered contact lens designed to help people with glaucoma manage their treatment. It does this by continuously measuring the curvature of the eye over a 24-hour period using a tiny strain gauge, built using micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) technology, which is incorporated into the lens.
But perhaps rather cooler is the idea of building displays into contacts so that images can be projected directly into the wearers eyes. This proves to be a significant technological problem.
The paper reports on the ground-breaking work of Babak Parviz, a researcher at the University of Washington, in Seattle.
Dr Parviz has already demonstrated that red and blue dots, or pixels, can indeed be embedded in lenses, though green will also be required to create a full-colour display. He has shown that the pixels can be powered wirelessly and he has demonstrated that he can shrink the optics required to bring these dots of light into focus, even when they are so close to the eye. So far, however, the closest Dr Parviz has come to creating an actual display is a lens containing a grid of just eight pixels.
Given the ubiquity of high-definition screens containing millions of pixels this may not seem very impressive. But it is worth remembering that this is much more difficult than creating normal displays. Quite apart from the challenges of powering such a small device and bringing the pixels into focus, the small size of a contact lens means that the pixels will have to be much smaller than those in a typical computer monitor or mobile-phone display in order to provide a similar resolution. “Our smallest ones are about 50 microns across,” he says. “We can definitely make them smaller.” He will have to: a pixel on a high-resolution iPhone screen, by comparison, is about 80 microns (millionths of a metre) across.
by Ben Rooney
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/06/08/smart-contact-lenses-may-deliver-medicine-direct-to-the-eye/?mod=google_news_blog
