An HUD for the guys on the ground?
I spy with my little bionic eye…
ExtremeTech, 21 Sep 2011
Well, it’s finally happened. I’ve spent my entire life waiting for a contact lens that will act as a HUD (Head-Up Display) for displaying the things I find interesting and pertinent, like email notifications and social media pings. Students at Washington University working with the IEEE released a paper showing that they could create a
contact lens containing an LED and a wireless antenna that was powered through an RF-charged storage capacitor. What does that mean? It’s a contact lens that can catch wireless signals to project an image into your field of vision.
If that’s not awesome, well, I don’t know what is. The main question I asked myself as I looked over the paper was “What took you so long?”, which was promptly answered as I read. Powering something so small on such a sensitive area is a difficulty class of its own, which the teams seem to have solved using RF (radio frequency) power, with a tiny receptacle to hold a charge. The wireless radio itself has to be within some pretty strict guidelines for radiation coming from emissions, and the material that makes up an LED (Light Emitting Diode) is pretty poisonous, so housing that is also a concern. You have to build a safe contact lens around what is essentially hazardous material; a daunting task. Doing all of this within the scale necessary to mount on a lens seems insane to me, but I don’t think I’m going to complain.
The article is highly technical, and if you want to jump into the meat and potatoes of the lense’s construction, jump in [PDF]. I think the ramifications are equally important for something like this, though, and that’s what I wanted to discuss.
I mentioned above how I wanted such a device so I knew when I got new email. The practical usage of this is exponentially cooler than such a simple and vain thing. The human eye is a pretty complicated organic device in and of itself, and it contains (via tear fluid) a window into many facets of your health, from glucose and sodium levels to meters used to detect disease. Wearing a contact lens that monitored your blood sugar, for instance, is worlds better than needles and pricking fingers three times a day for those with diabetes. This is technology that can change the face of the fight against disease and methods of prevention & cure. Couple a sensor in a lens with an attached insulin pump and you alleviate the need for needles at all.
On the flip side, introducing high technology into devices used to monitor bodily functions can bring peril as well as wonder. As Jay Radcliffe showed us at the Black Hat Security Conference this year, wireless hacking of the new insulin pumps is not only possible, but confirmed. I think as the technology for projecting an image onto a contact lens gets better, the ramifications of it’s security also increase. The insulin pump is one of the more fatal examples, as an outside hacker could gain access to the sensor mechanism in your pump and make it think your blood sugar is dangerously low, which can trigger a lethal dose of insulin. Can you build proper safeguards into microscopic wireless devices? With those dangers in mind, is this technology even something that should be pursued?
http://www.extremetech.com/electroni...tle-bionic-eye
Linear Mode
