Turning Contact Lenses Into Telescopes at a Wink of an Eye

A right wink by someone wearing the contact lenses and a complementary set of glasses switches magnification on, and a left wink switches it off.

Nancy Crotti

A Swiss university has unveiled a contact lens-glasses combination that could allow the visually impaired to switch between normal and telescopic vision in the wink of an eye.

Optics specialist Eric Tremblay of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) introduced a prototype of the telescopic contact lens at the at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Jose, California.

The lens is the first of its kind, according to a statement by the technical university. Tremblay designed it to help people with age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness among older adults in the Western world, and others with low vision.

The contact lens magnifies 2.8 times by incorporating a thin reflective telescope inside a 1.55 mm-thick lens. Small mirrors inside the telescope expand the perceived size of objects and magnify the view, according to EPFL.

"It's like looking through low-magnification binoculars," the university explained.

A right wink by someone wearing the contact lenses and a complementary set of glasses switches magnification on, and a left wink switches it off. A small light and detector enable the glasses to distinguish between a blink and wink, and ignore the blinks.

The glasses electronically select a polarization of light to reach the contact lens, which allows one type of polarization in the 1x aperture and another in the 2.8x aperture, the statement said. The wearer sees the view where the polarization of the glasses and contact lenses' aperture matches.

Tremblay and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego; Paragon Vision Sciences; Innovega; Pacific Sciences and Engineering; and Rockwell Collins, started with "scleral" lenses to develop the telescopic contact lens. Scleral lenses are larger and more rigid than typical soft contact lenses, and are typically worn by people with irregularly shaped corneas.

They added several precision-cut and assembled pieces of plastics, aluminum mirrors, and polarizing thin films fixed with biologically safe glues. They incorporated tiny air channels--roughly 0.1 mm wide--within the lens to allow oxygen to flow around and underneath the normally impermeable structures to reach the cornea.

The researchers are still working on image quality and oxygen permeability, but believe that improvements in mechanical and manufacturing processes will help, the EPFL statement said. They received funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military.

EPFL's contact lens/glasses combo signals the latest attempt by researchers to turn contact lenses into high-tech medical devices.

Google announced it was working on insulin-measuring contact lenses in January 2014. Within six months, Swiss multinational Novartis and its Alconeye care division agreed to in-license Google's "smart lens" technology for all ocular medical uses.

In unrelated research, a University of Pittsburgh chemistry professor developed three-dimensional photonic crystals that allow for contact lenses with a dot that changes color based on glucose levels. Diabetics would supposedly look in a mirror and check out the dot color.

In April last year, the news leaked that Google had applied for a patent to embed a tiny camera in a contact lens.

In 2013, researchers from Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School Department of Ophthalmology, Boston Children's Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper that describes a drug-eluting contact lens designed to treat glaucoma.

Roanoke, VA-startup Elenza has developed an electronic intraocular lens that automatically refocuses for near, intermediate, and far distances using complex algorithms. Bellevue, WA-based Innovega with its iOptik platform embedded a center filter and display lens at the center of a contact lens. 

Nancy Crotti is a contributor to Qmed and MPMN.

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