Smart Lenses Will Do More Than Just Improve Your Vision

Some forty million Americans wear contact lenses, but imagine if those lenses could do more than just bring the outside world into focus?

There are scientists working on the next generation of contact lenses, so called “smart lenses”, and the potential is pretty amazing.

These are so called smart lenses, packed with circuits, sensors, and wireless technology.

“There’s a possibility to develop a really, really important new tool for medicine,” says Smart Lense developer Babak Parviz. He’s testing a smart lens that could one day replace the standard blood test. “It allows for a very non-invasive, continuous monitoring of the human body.”

Parviz believes bio-markers found in the blood, such as cholesterol, sodium, potassium and glucose can all be found on the surface of the eye.

One lens can monitor glucose and radio out the result. “Someday maybe you can read the result with your cell phone.”

Kim carter has Type 1 diabetes and pricks her finger 5 to 7 times a day. “I hate it,” says Kim, “it hurts.” So, she says she would definitely try it out if one became available on the market.

Smart Lenses as Medical Indicators A team at the University of Maryland has developed a patented technology for monitoring blood glucose with contact lenses that change color as a function of blood sugar levels. The lenses have a sensor spot on the surface that detects the amount of glucose present in tears. If the sensor is inside the pupil zone, the wearer can detect the color change. When placed in the periphery of the lens, the wearer can see the change in a mirror.

The developer reports that sensing a change in glucose levels through tears lags about 30 minutes behind a change in the blood. The always-present monitoring may surpass the average of four times daily blood assessment by way of actual blood testing. The system may be advantageous for patients who require testing by a caretaker.

It is anticipated that this technology will only add a small incremental cost to current disposable lenses because the fluorescent sensor can be imprinted on lenses without any process changes in the overall manufacturing.

Another researcher, Sanford Asher, Ph.D., professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, is studying how “photonic crystals” can be incorporated in contact lenses to measure the presence of glucose in the tears, which would correlate to blood sugar levels. The photonic crystal is a gel made up of a proprietary combination of boronic acid and other chemicals. The chemicals form an array of long polymer chains, which contain receptors that bind to the structure of glucose. The spacing between the chains in the array changes as it comes into contact with glucose to cause a varying spectral refraction: high glucose results in a purple color, low glucose produces a reddish color and normal glucose levels produce a green color.