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A New Smart Contact Lens Can Charge Wirelessly Without Burning Your Eyeballs
The technology uses supercapacitors and will help speed the creation of contacts lenses that monitor the body
When smart contact lenses — wearable, functional electronics for your eyes — finally arrive, they could provide a revolutionary platform for biometric tracking, drug delivery, augmented reality, and military-grade night vision. But a major reason you can’t get these at your local Lenscrafters is because they require power to run, which may result in them becoming too hot. Anyone whose thighs have been seared by an overheated laptop would, understandably, think twice before sticking a potentially scorching disc of plastic, smart or not, onto their pupil.
However, a new collaboration between South Korean teams, led by Jang-Ung Park at Yonsei University in Seoul and Sang-Young Lee at the Ulsan Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, suggests a much cooler future for smart contact lenses.
The team, which published a paper last week in the journal Science Advances, says they’ve developed a soft, wirelessly recharging smart contact lens that didn’t sear the eyeballs of the male New Zealand white rabbit and the male human volunteer who wore one for 10 minutes straight.
