SMARTPHONE-CONNECTED CONTACT LENSES GIVE NEW MEANING TO 'EYE PHONE'

Apps allow you to link your smartphone to anything from your shoes, to your jewelry, to your doorbell-and now, you can able to add your contact lenses to that list. Engineers at the University of Washington have developed an innovative way of communicating that would allow medical aids such as contact lenses and brain implants to send signals to smartphones. The new tech, called "interscatter communication", works by converting Bluetooth signals into wifi signals. Instead of generating wifi signals on your own, our technology creates wifi by Bluetooth transmissions from nearby mobile devices such as smartwatches. Interscatter communication would allow devices such as contact lenses to send data to other devices, according to the researchers. Until now, such communication had not been possible, because sending data using wifi requires too much power for a device like a contact lenses. To demonstrate interscatter communication, the engineers designed a contact lenses equipped with a tiny antenna. The Bluetooth signal, in this case, came from a smartwatch. The antenna on the contact lens was able to manipulate that Bluetooth signal, encode data from the contact lens and convert into a wifi signal that could be ready by another device. For example, it is possible to monitor blood sugar level 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 level come down, study co-author vikram iyer, a doctor student in electrical engineering also at the University of Washington.