Telescopic contact lens shows promise for macular degeneration
*Last updated: Feb 15, 2015 at 3am PST**
**
**By Staff**
**Medical News Today*
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/289504.php
An innovation that combines a telescopic contact lens with "smart"
glasses that look like normal eyewear looks set to be a great help to
people with serious vision problems, such as age-related macular
degeneration.
telescopic contact lens
/The telescopic contact lens magnifies 2.8 times.
Image credit: EPFL/
While current see-through wearable displays that improve poor vision are
available, they are clunky, impractical and people do not like using
them in social situations.
The team of academic and private developers behind the new zoomable lens
and glasses combination hopes that their invention - which is soon to
enter clinical trials - will be a more attractive option.
Estimates suggest that worldwide, there are around 285 million people
with serious vision problems, including age-relatedmacular degeneration
<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/152105.php>(AMD) - a painless
eye condition that results in gradual loss of central vision and is the
leading cause of blindness in older people in the Western world.
One of the developers of the new contact lens and glasses combination is
Eric Tremblay, an optics specialist at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale
de Lausanne (EPFL) - one of the two Federal Institutes of Technology of
Switzerland. He worked with Joe Ford at the University of California-San
Diego, and other collaborators.
Tremblay recently unveiled a new prototype of his telescopic contact
lens - the first of its kind - at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Jose,
CA, last week.
At the meeting, Tremblay also presented the smart glasses that are worn
with the telescopic contact lenses. They allow the wearer to control the
zoom feature of the contact lens with eye blinks. The glasses are
designed to recognize winks and ignore blinks.
"We think these lenses hold a lot of promise for low vision and AMD,"
says Tremblay. He adds:
"It's very important and hard to strike a balance between function
and the social costs of wearing any kind of bulky visual device.
There is a strong need for something more integrated, and a contact
lens is an attractive direction. At this point this is still
research, but we are hopeful it will eventually become a real option
for people with AMD."
Telescopic contact lens magnifies 2.8 times
The telescopic contact lens magnifies 2.8 times. Since the first
prototype in 2013, the developers have been fine tuning the lens
material so it can be worn comfortably over longer periods. They have
also been developing eyewear accessories that look attractive.
The contact lens is 1.55 mm thick and has a very thin reflective
telescope inside. Tiny mirrors reflect the light, expanding and
magnifying viewed objects so what you see is similar to what you can see
through low magnification binoculars.
The contact lenses are scleral lenses - they are larger and more rigid
than many of the types of contact lenses people wear today. They are
made from several pieces of precision cut plastic, aluminum mirrors and
polarizing thin films, held together with biologically safe glues.
*One of the challenges the team has been working on is making the lens
more breathable so the eye has a steady supply of oxygen. They designed
the lens so it has tiny air channels about 0.1 mm wide.*
The developers are still working on improving oxygen permeability and
image quality, which they hope to achieve as they refine and increase
their understanding of the mechanical and manufacturing processes.
Glasses and contact lens use polarized light to select magnification
People with AMD may only need the contact lens. But people without AMD
may prefer to have magnification "on demand," which is why the
developers are also working on the glasses.
The glasses look like normal eyewear except they have a small light
source detector that recognizes winks and ignores blinks of the wearer's
eyes. They wink with the right eye for magnification and with the left
eye to restore normal vision.
*In the magnification mode, the glasses polarize light one way, and in
the normal mode, they polarize it the other way. The contact lens is
designed so that one type of polarized light uses the 1x aperture, and
the other type of polarization uses the 2.8x aperture. Thus, the wearer
sees the view where the polarization of the glasses matches that of the
contact lens aperture.
*
The research is funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA).
Meanwhile,/Medical News Today/recently learned that another team is
developing a new eyeglass material that will allow the wearer tomake
their eyeglasses become shaded on command
<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/289018.php>. The idea is to
give users more control over when their glasses darken, such as while
driving or wearing a hat - situations that current transitional lenses
do not cope with very well.
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