Category: Eyes

EPFL‘s Eric Tremblay and DARPA have developed contact lenses with integrated tiny telescopic lenses to boost vision. The lens is controlled by smart glasses that respond to the winking of an eye, and provides magnification of up to 2.8 times.

This can be a visual aid for Age-related Macular Degeneration and other conditions, in addition to the originally intended military use.

The prototype is .06 in. thick and contains a very thin, reflective, two-part magnifying region that is turned on and off by defined eyelid movements.  It can differentiate between longer, deliberate winks and normal blinks.  The accompanying glasses  allow the wearer to wink with the right eye to zoom in, and wink with the left eye to return to standard vision.

The telescoping lenses are created with larger, rigid scleral lenses, placed on the the white of the eye.  They are made from precision-machined plastic components, tiny aluminum mirrors, and thin polarizing films,  held together with biologically safe adhesives. The necessary constant stream of oxygen is provided by tiny air channels across the structure of the lens.

Wearable Tech + Digital Health NYC 2015 – June 30 @ New York Academy of Sciences

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and Second Sight are developing  glasses with embedded vision and eye tracking sensors to be used with a  new retinal prosthesis system.  The system will identify obstacles, doorways, hallways, and household objects and their relative positions. The information will be projected into the retinal prosthesis, bypassing the damaged rods and cones in the retina.

The components are meant to enable APL‘s  broader vision of a semiautonomous controller for assistive robotic manipulators and remote devices, called Hybrid Augmented Reality Multimodal Operation Neural Integration Environment (HARMONIE).

Wearable Tech + Digital Health NYC 2015 – June 30 @ New York Academy of Sciences

The Monash Vision Group is building a bionic eye in an attempt to restore sight by transmitting wireless signals directly to an implant in the brain, bypassing the eye.

The MVG system bypasses the retina and optic nerve and wirelessly stimulates the ‘vision’ center of the brain using implantable electrode arrays.  A digital camera is embedded in headwear that captures images from the user’s environment.  Digital processors and computer algorithms modify the images.  A wireless transmitter presents the images to microchips in an implant surgically inserted at the back of the brain.  The chips stimulate the visual cortex with electrical signals using arrays of micro-sized electrodes, producing small flashes of light (phosphenes) in a 2-dimensional array.  A wearer can be trained to use the phosphenes to navigate and recognize objects.  MVG is able to implant 473 electrodes with its first prototype, depending on the size and location of a patient’s visual cortex.

Bionic Vision Australia is also developing a solution to restore site  — a microchip inserted into a patient’s retina.  The system consists of a camera attached to glasses which transmit high-frequency radio signals to an implanted microchip.  Electrodes on the implanted chip convert the signals to electrical impulses to stimulate cells in the retina that connect to the optic nerve.  The impulses are passed down along the optic nerve to the vision processing centers of the brain, where they are interpreted as images.  The company is working on three devices: an early prototype with 24 electrodes, a wide-view device with 98 electrodes, and a high-acuity device with 1024 electrodes.