Implantable camera patent application
From NewScientist comes details of a planned implantable camera:
Light-sensitive chips that sit at the back of the eye have great potential to help people with certain types of vision loss. They work by converting light into an electrical signal that can then be fed directly to the brain via nerve cells at the back of the eye.
The eye’s lens normally projects an image onto a curved surface called the retina at the back of the eye. This creates problems for light-sensitive chips since they have to be flat.
One way around this is to use a camera outside the eye to record images and send them via a wire to the chip at the back of the eye.
But Michelle Hauer, an optical engineer at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, US, says a better idea is to implant the camera directly within the eye, but avoiding the retina.
She and colleagues have come up with a design that is small enough to be implanted within the lens of the eye, and takes into account the effect of the cornea on incoming light.
The device transmits images to a chip at the back of the eye, which passes the image signals on to the nerve cells.
Hauer says the device would have an onboard battery that could be charged wirelessly by induction, making the set-up relatively inconspicuous.
thanks for the tip-off Joshua Normal!
Hi,
This is my first comment, hope it doesn’t go unnoticed :) You’ve got a pretty cool site here, thanks Warren Ellis for the push! It seems a bit weird, though, that there are so few people commenting, ’cause all of this is at least thought-provoking.
Anyway, on the ocular enhancement field, I just read this:
“Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision
Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes – visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.
The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.” The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW’s electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center’s ophthalmology department.
There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.
“People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about. Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it’s safe,” said Parviz, who heads a multi-disciplinary UW group that is developing electronics for contact lenses.
The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.
Contact lenses with metal connectors for electronic circuits were safely worn by rabbits in lab tests.
Click here for more information.
Ideally, installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out, and once installed the wearer would barely know the gadget was there, Parviz said.
Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across. They then sprinkled the grayish powder of electrical components onto a sheet of flexible plastic. The shape of each tiny component dictates which piece it can attach to, a microfabrication technique known as self-assembly. Capillary forces – the same type of forces that make water move up a plant’s roots, and that cause the edge of a glass of water to curve upward – pull the pieces into position.
The prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer’s vision, but the technique could be used on a corrective lens, Parviz said. And all the gadgetry won’t obstruct a person’s view.
“There is a large area outside of the transparent part of the eye that we can use for placing instrumentation,” Parviz said. Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens, Parviz said.
A full-fledged display won’t be available for a while, but a version that has a basic display with just a few pixels could be operational “fairly quickly,” according to Parviz.
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The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a Technology Gap Innovation Fund from the University of Washington.
For more information, contact Parviz at (206) 616-4038 or babak@ee.washington.edu.”
via EurekaAlert (great site): http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-01/uow-clw011708.php
Hi there Merlin, glad you’re enjoying Grinding!
Thanks for sharing the ocular enhancement news.
We actually covered that story in our post Early Prototype of HUD in a contact lens.
Please do feel free to share anything else you find in this or any area.
cheers!