Free Post 5: Bionic Contact Lens

For this week’s free post I was looking around for some other cool biomedical inventions. I found on a list of great inventions that there was contact lenses that uses tiny LED’s and can show information such as maps and other things into the visual field and it appears that the information floats out in front of the eye. This sounded very cool so I tried to look into it more but instead stumbled upon a related invention. I found an article about a contact lens for blind people. I know what you are thinking,” why would a blind person need corrective lenses?” Well this is not a traditional contact lens. It is worn over the eye and is connected to a camera and the contract makes minute movements and, much like brail, a person can be taught to read these movements.

 I find this fascinating. I think it is such an interesting way to try and help the visually impaired. The article says the cornea of the human eye has 600 times more tactile receptors than the human fingertip. This seems like a statement that is taken a bit out of context. But if that is accurate I have no reason to believe that a cornea couldn’t read. The article also says that healthy people can distinguish things through the device after as little as 5 minutes. I do have another thing that I have a hard time getting my head around is how this device is tolerated being on the eye. I wear contact lenses. And I know it was a struggle to get used to them and they aren’t supposed to be felt.  Based on my experiences, I would have to believe that wearing something like this would be agonizingly uncomfortable.  The article also stated that the device has only been tested on healthy people. So I am wondering if there would be a difference in how a blind person would interpret the tactile images. Although it might be safe to say that they would take to the product very well seeing as how people with sensory defects tend to have their other senses increased to make up for the deficit.

Works Cited

Kloosterman, Karina. “Bionic Contact Lenses Turn Touch Into Vision” ISRAEL21c. israel21c.org. 23 July 2013. Web. 6 October 2013.