When we think smartglasses and smart contact lenses, our minds typically turn to futuristic visions of augmented reality and world-sized artificial screens for all of our work and entertainment.
But the first uses might be much more for medical purposes.
And they might have much more real-world impact for people with poor vision.
Not an artificial contact lens but merely a normal eye, viewing a light.
That seems to be the case for a prototype smart contact lens that is currently in clinical trials at Ghent University in Belgium, in association with Imec, an international research and innovation hub for nanotechnology and digital technologies. The smart contact lens is a sandwich: a bubble of regular hard or soft contact lens surrounding a liquid crystal “display,” a tiny controller ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit, a light sensor, an accelerometer and gyroscope, and a very thin solid-state lithium-ion battery.
“We would like to be able to change the vision of people by using the liquid crystal [display],” Ghent assistant professor Andrés Vásquez Quintero told me recently on the TechFirst podcast. “About the different diseases or disorders that we can help, mostly it’s people that have high sensitivity to light.”
Photophobia is just the one of the visual disorders that the Ghent University smart contact lens is addressing. This high sensitivity to light causes vision problems, but others who could benefit from reduced light exposure are those with neurological problems like chronic migraines and traumatic brain injuries, Quintero says.
The smart contact lens works by using the liquid crystal “screen” to actually block light. A light sensor notices when light is too bright, then notifies the “screen” to turn black, blocking some of the light.
In effect, the contact lens is now an artificial iris.
And the “screen” is not a screen like a computer monitor or smartphone, but a screen in the old-fashioned sense: screening or blocking vision.
“This is called photophobia ... we can help these patients to reduce the amount of light that enters into the eye, and then they can then go ahead through their daily life with a better quality of life,” Quintero says.
Listen to the interview behind this story:
Which doesn’t mean high-end augmented reality developments aren’t coming.
But initially those too will be focused on helping people with vision problems, not enhancing our normal vision with superhuman digital/real mixed realities.
“The first step ... is that we are going to help patients with a low vision problem, with augmented reality but a very low amount of pixels,” Quintero told me. “So it’s not like we’re going to have a movie displayed on our contact lens because, as you mentioned, we need more powered and more computing power, but we’re going to give simple signals for people with no vision.”
In other words, a big arrow superimposed over your visual field indicating that you should turn left, or right. Or, a big stop sign when there are unsafe conditions ahead.
While the smart contact lens is still in clinical trials, Quintero says it’s quite comfortable, with all the electronic components safely sandwiched between layers of contact lens, and not adding very much bulk to the contact.
In addition, battery life for the tiny on-board system is a full day, which makes sense for most contact wearers who (like myself) take out their lenses at night.
In addition to augmented reality features, Quintero is looking to provide significant medical insights from the smart contact lenses.
“You can integrate different sensors in our contact lens platform and then you’re able to give the patient some kind of feedback about what’s really in the body, because whatever you can measure in the tear fluid you can also measure in blood,” he says. “So in fact, that’s very interesting, but of course for that you need specialized sensors, you need more power, and then a way to communicate the data out from the contact lens.”
Adding a Bluetooth radio to the smart contact lens would significantly add to the power drain, as would additional sensors, but if tear fluid is as revealing as blood samples, that opens the door to a lot of medical possibility.
All of which, at this point, is still in the future. Clinical trials with prototypes are already in progress; further clinical trials with later generations of the smart contact lenses will happen at some point in the future.
Get a full transcript of my conversation with Andrés Vásquez Quintero here.
