A team from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne has unveiled new lenses that have the ability to zoom in with the blink of an eye.
After the lenses that measure your blood sugar level, here are the lenses with an integrated zoom. These new contact lenses were presented on February 13 at the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This device, which was developed by a Swiss team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), offers people who wear it the possibility of zooming in up to 2.8 times.
It only takes a blink of an eye to get it going. The lenses are, in fact, coupled with a specific pair of glasses: when the wearers blink with their right eye, the lenses start to zoom, when they blink with their left eye, the device returns to its normal position.
Helping people with AMD
The 1.5-millimeter telescope is inserted into the lens and reflects the light through a set of integrated mirrors. “We believe that these lenses promise a lot for people with low vision and for those with AMD,” explains Eric Tremblay, a researcher at EPFL, who presented the device at the California congress.
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) causes progressive or rapid loss of central vision without causing pain. People affected by this disease (one million in France) can therefore only use their lateral vision: these contact lenses could improve their viewing comfort.
Need a less visible device
Current solutions are not suitable: there are glasses mounted with telescopes for people with AMD, but they are very large and have a negative impact on social interactions. In addition, they do not follow the movement of the eyes, so users must move their heads in order to use them.
“It is very important but also very complicated to succeed in finding a balance between the efficiency and the ‘social costs’ of carrying bulky devices. There is a strong need for something more integrated, and a contact lens is a direction [de recherche] attractive. We are still in the research stage, but we hope it becomes a real option for people living with AMD ”.
It is also possible to surgically insert a small telescope into the eye, but this operation costs around 6000 pounds, 8,100 euros, according to Daily Telegraph. Contact lenses should be cheaper.
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