Electronic Contact Lens promises bionic capabilities for everyone

With the ability to record everything we see, which the UW Contact lens will ultimately enable, the concept of privacy, instant recall and a whole host of new capabilities come into play – remember that reliable, solid state data storage is becoming more cost effective by the day. A decade from now, recording everything we say and do is now a distinct possibility.

Bio-sensing and a wearable health monitoring system

Perhaps the most left-field aspect to the UW study is the promise of a wearable health monitoring system. “The second big area that we are looking at is bio-sensing, because on the surface of the contact lens there are a lot of biomarkers already present that are important for monitoring health care,” explains Parviz.

“We recognized that if we could have a contact lens that incorporated biosensors that could sample the biology of the eye we could constantly report it outside, and hence have a non-invasive way of putting people on continuous health monitoring.”

Whatsmore, the system also has the capability of displaying the key indicators in real time to the wearer or a relevant third party as a personal dashboard via their heads up display.

How the project began

“The way this whole thing started,” says Assistant Professor Babak Parviz, “was that we were looking at conventional contact lenses and we noticed that they were straightforward polymer structures. They do something useful in vision correction, but the structure of the system is simple – it’s just one material.”

“The expertise we have in our group surrounds nanotechnology and microfabrication which enables us to make a lot of very small, very useful devices, so we thought that if we could migrate all these devices onto a contact lens, we could get a lot more functionality out of this simple object that’s used by millions of people. The contact lens is safe to use and people are quite comfortable with using them.”

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