Popping in a contact lens could soon protect you from a diabetic attack. The lens, which has a tiny plastic nanostructure embedded in it, provides realtime alerts before blood sugar levels become dangerous – and it could be mass-produced in the next five years.
Researchers at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea made the breakthrough by squeezing a minuscule LED display embedded inside a contact lens, which alerts the wearer when their blood sugar levels are too low.
"Diabetic patients need to monitor their glucose levels a few times per day," says Jang-Ung Park, an associate professor at the UNIST who worked on the project. "Currently they do this through their blood, so non-invasive methods are preferred."
Previous attempts to develop a smart contact lens have been bulky and uncomfortable, using materials that are too brittle whilst blocking the vision of the wearer and harming the eye. On top of this, the materials have proven too expensive for scalability.
Jang-Ung Park and his colleagues have been able to create soft, flexible and transparent polymer materials – like the ones used in ordinary contact lenses – while also including glucose sensors, wireless power transfer circuits, and display pixels that display visual sensing signals in real time.
The sensor, which is made of graphene, continuously monitors glucose concentration in tears and sends the data via a transparent and stretchable antenna in the lens. This then triggers the pixels in the LED display. When glucose levels get too high, the LED light turns on and alerts the wearer to their dangerous blood sugar level.
If the researchers receive enough funding, the team think they can commercialise the product in the next five years. "Our lens fabrication uses conventional fabrication processing steps of typical electronic devices. So the mass production of our contact lens will be possible," says Park. "As the next step, we are doing research into fabricating a smart contact lens with multiplexed sensors, which can monitor chronic diseases."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
