How your contact lenses could talk to your phone

With interscatter technology, contact lenses could monitor blood sugar, credit cards could talk to each other

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Your contact lenses or a sensor implanted in your encephalon could some day send wellness updates to your smartphone and even your doctor.

A new technology called interscatter communication that'south being developed at the University of Washington would permit modest devices, such equally contact lenses, implantable sensors and credit cards, to communicate with everyday devices, like smartphones and smart watches.

"Wireless connectivity for implanted devices can transform how we manage chronic diseases," said UW researcher Vikram Iyer, in a argument. "For example, a contact lens could monitor a diabetics claret sugar level in tears and transport notifications to the phone when the blood saccharide level goes downwards."

Researchers at the Seattle university built a few proof-of-concept demos for applications that previously had been impractical or incommunicable to create. One demonstration was for a smart contact lens and another was for an implantable neural recording device that could communicate directly with a smartphone or picket.

The research is funded past the National Science Foundation and Google Faculty Research Awards. Google has shown particular interest in the technology and was conducting its own inquiry into smart contact lenses that can test diabetics' claret glucose levels 2 years ago.

Using wireless chips and miniaturized glucose sensors embedded betwixt ii layers of soft contact lens fabric, the smart lenses were beingness designed to test blood sugar levels in the user's tears.

When it announced the inquiry in 2014, Google said its scientists were experimenting with using LED lights in the lenses to alert users if their glucose levels were off.

The UW inquiry could solve the communications trouble for many devices, including sensors and credit card, as well as contact lenses.

The interscatter communication works by converting Bluetooth signals into Wi-Fi transmissions over the air that can be picked up by a smartphone or smart sentry. That enables these devices, which take very little power, to communicate with other devices without whatsoever extra equipment.

UW'southward inquiry team, which is made up of figurer scientists and electric engineers, said that by using common mobile devices to generate Wi-Fi signals, they can use x,000 times less free energy than they would using other advice methods.

"That means that we can utilise just every bit much bandwidth as a Wi-Fi network and you can still take other Wi-Fi networks operate without interference," said electrical engineering science doctoral student and researcher Bryce Kellogg, in a argument.

Bated from the medical applications, the UW researchers said that interscatter communications besides could be used to enable smart credit cards to communicate with each other.

For example, if ii people want to split a restaurant pecker, they might simply tap their cards together to share the information.

"Providing the ability for these everyday objects like credit cards – in add-on to implanted devices – to communicate with mobile devices tin can unleash the power of ubiquitous connectivity," said Shyam Gollakota, assistant professor of information science and applied science at UW.

Copyright © 2016 IDG Communications, Inc.