Future Contact Lenses

03Aug08

 

Imagine wearing contact lenses that monitor the health of your eyes in addition to giving you perfect vision. Better still, how about a contact lens that displays everything from your location (using GPS) to the time and weather? Is it possible to have bionic contact lenses that allow for telescopic vision? It would be very cool to walk down the aisle of a drugstore to find BionicVue Contact Lenses for sale!

 

The above scenarios may still be fictional up to now but there are some amazing advances in contact lens technology that are being developed and may soon be available to everyone.

 

Presently, contact lens researchers are developing a contact lens that will automatically focus using liquid crystals and a built-in range finder. The system consists of a contact lens, liquid crystals attached to the lens, a view detector that communicates with the liquid crystals, and an external power source.

 

The view detector will use either lasers, radio waves, or microwaves to judge the distance from the object being viewed by the user. The researchers don’t explain where the power is coming from or how the viewfinder will judge distances. This project is still a work in progress so hopefully we will see a working model soon.

 

At the University of Florida, researchers have developed “drug loaded” contact lenses that deliver medication at certain intervals. These contact lenses were developed for people that have glaucoma or other serious eye diseases. These lenses contain drug filled “nanoparticles” that release medication slowly into the eyes. The advantage of these lenses is that the medication from the lenses go directly into the eye whereas eye drops go mostly into the bloodstream.

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Tags: bionic lenses, drug loaded lenses, future contact lenses, GPS lenses, nanoparticles