This smart contact lens is an artificial iris that can dynamically change your vision
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier with chat with Andrés Vásquez Quintero, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium, where researchers have just presented an artificial iris embedded in a smart contact lens.
It has an artificial iris, an all-day battery, an on-board ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit, and a very small LCD screen. And it can do very basic augmented reality for people with limited vision.
PLEASE NOTE: the wifi at Ghent was not great, so Andres’ video is pretty sketchy and a little delayed at points. That’s mostly fixed in the audio, and cleaned up in the transcript below (keep scrolling).
In the tech industry, we tend to think of smart contact lenses sort of like smart glasses. They’re kind of the next smartphone only smaller maybe, less visible, less intrusive, and more wearable. But actually, smart contact lenses might be more useful medically for people with poor vision or eye diseases, and they might be available in just a few years. At Ghent University in Belgium, researchers have just presented an artificial iris embedded in a smart contact lens.
Andrés Vásquez Quintero: Yeah, well basically we have made a smart contact lens platform that involves different electronic components, and we focus on trying to fix the vision of people. So these are needs of some patients. And then inside of the lens we have different components, electronics, and liquid crystal models to be able to help these patients.
