Contact lenses help diabetes
A biochemical engineer from the University of Western Ontario came up with probably one of the most useful inventions for diabetics. Diabetes don’t have to suffer anymore of drawing blood regularly so that they would check there sugar level.
Hydrogen contact lenses provide a new and non painful way of checking the level of glucose by changing colors each time the level of sugar in blood increases or lowers. This is possible due to nanoparticles implanted in the lenses. These particles come into contact with glucose molecules found in human tears. As a result of chemical reaction, the lenses change their color, warning the person about the sugar levels.
Superhuman Vision
Contact Lenses With Circuits and Lights that can help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.
Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.
The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.
Installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out.
Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across. They then sprinkled the grayish powder of electrical components onto a sheet of flexible plastic. The shape of each tiny component dictates which piece it can attach to, a micro fabrication technique known as self-assembly pull the pieces into position.
Healed by Contact Lenses
Getting drugs into the eye is difficult because the eye is well adapted at keeping foreign objects out, so most drugs are washed out by tears, disappear down the eye’s drainage system, or simply spilled outside the eye. So to overcome this problem soft contact lenses steeped in a solution of drug is used However, it is hard to full a dose large enough to be clinically significant into lenses.
So Mark Byrne, a chemical engineer at Auburn University in Alabama, has a developed a contact-lens material that can hold much greater concentrations of drugs and release them more slowly.
The trick is to design the molecular structure of the lens material to mimic tissue-receptor sites that the drug will target within the body. The goal is to make the dummy receptors strike a balance, not holding the drug too tight, but also only releasing it slowly into the eye.
Byrne has set up a company – OcuMedic – to commercialise the idea and is already developing anti-fungal contact lenses for treating eye infections in horses.
Interesting
interesting…nano particles huh
Still use silicone.
Science and inventions? You need to practice your spelling, with all due respect.