Smart Contact Lenses Developed at the University of Washington

University of Washington scientists have developed a way to link your smartphones to your contact lenses using a new technology called the “interscatter communication.”

Using this technology, medical aid such as contact lenses and brain implants can send signals to smartphones.

The “interscatter communication” works by converting Bluetooth signals into Wi-Fi signals. (Elaborate more here on the technology.) This technology will create Wi-Fi by using Bluetooth transmissions from nearby mobile devices such as smartwatches, instead of generating Wi-Fi signals on its own

The “Interscatter” is based on an existing method of communication called backscatter, which lets devices exchange information by reflecting back existing signals Itworks the same way as backscatter, but the key difference is that it allows for inter-technology communication — in other words, it allows Bluetooth signals and Wi-Fi signals to talk to each other.

According to the researchers, through interscatter communication devices such as contact lens, we will be able to send data to other devices. Such  communication was not possible until now, because sending data using Wi-Fi requires too much power for a device like a contact lens.

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To demonstrate this innovative technological advancement, the engineers designed a contact lens with a tiny antenna.The smartwatch sent the Bluetooth signal and the antenna on the contact lens was able to manipulate that Bluetooth signal, encode data from the contact lens and convert it into a Wi-fi signal that could be read by another device.

This technology can help provide valuable medical information to patients.

For example, it is possible to monitor blood sugar levels from a person’s tears. Therefore, a connected contact lens could track blood sugar levels and send notifications to a person’s phone when blood sugar levels went down, study co-author Vikram Iyer, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, also at the University of Washington, said in a statement.

The researchers also said interscatter communication could be used to transmit data from brain implants that could one day help people with paralysis regain movement.

The engineers wrote in a paper that was presented on Aug. 22 at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication conference in Brazil.  

For more information, please visit: www.washington.edu