Smart contact lenses could enable drug delivery, night vision, and augmented reality

Aug. 4, 2014
An MIT Technology Review article from Suzanne Jacobs explains how smart contact lenses could be used to deliver drugs, sense intraocular pressure, and even enable night vision and augmented reality.

An MIT Technology Review article from Suzanne Jacobs explains how smart contact lenses could be used to deliver drugs, sense intraocular pressure, and even enable night vision and augmented reality.

RELATED ARTICLE: Contact lenses could cure myopia

Jacobs says that Google and Novartis are teaming up to develop contact lenses that monitor glucose levels and automatically adjust their focus; possibly just the start of a clever new product category of smart contact lenses that enable cancer detection and drug delivery to reality augmentation and night visionoffering unique opportunities for both health monitoring and enhancement.

One of the Novartis-Google prototype lenses contains a device about the size of a speck of glitter that measures glucose in tears. A wireless antenna then transmits the measurements to an external device--designed to ease the burden of diabetics who otherwise have to prick their fingers to test their blood sugar levels.

Glucose isn't the only thing that can be measured from tears rather than a blood sample; tears also contain a chemical called lacryglobin that serves as a biomarker for breast, colon, lung, prostate, and ovarian cancers. Monitoring lacryglobin levels could be particularly useful for cancer patients who are in remission, and drug delivery is another future use for smart contacts. The autofocusing lens is in an earlier stage of development, but the goal is for it to adjust its shape depending on where the eye is looking, which would be especially helpful for people who need reading glasses. A current prototype of the lens uses photodiodes to detect light hitting the eye and determine whether the eye is directed downward.

In Sweden, a company called Sensimed is working on a contact lens that measures the intraocular pressure that results from the liquid buildup in the eyes of glaucoma patients, and researchers at the University of Michigan are using graphene to make infrared-sensitive contact lenses that might one day provide some form of night vision without the bulky headgear.

Per the video above, the Seattle-based company Innovega has developed a contact lens with a small area that filters specific bands of red, green, and blue light, giving users the ability to focus on a very small, high resolution display less than an inch away from their eyes without interfering with normal vision. That makes tiny displays attached to glasses look more like IMAX movie screens. Together, the lens and display are called iOptik.

SOURCE: MIT Technology Review; http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529196/what-else-could-smart-contact-lenses-do/

About the Author

Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)

Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.

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