Smart Contact Lens Which Could Give Superpowers to the Soldiers

By: | May 4th, 2019

Jean-Louis de Bougrenet de la Tocnaye and his stand-alone contact lens with a flexible micro battery (IMT Atlantique)

Researchers at leading French engineering school IMT Atlantique, have created a smart contact lens having a flexible micro battery which could give ‘superpowers’ to the people.

Lens was basically designed for medical and automotive applications. Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is showing interest in this wirelessly-connected contact lens to expand their troop’s visual capabilities in the field.

Contact lens is light in weight and is capable of working efficiently without any bulky external power supply. It not only provides the user with visual assistance, but it also relays visual information wirelessly.

Scaling down the battery was a big challenge for the team

However, newly developed flexible micro battery, showed them a way to continuously light an LED light source for “several hours,”

Researchers are hopeful that smart contact lens’ abilities could be further enhanced using ‘graphene-based flexible electronics’.

Project head Jean-Louis Bougrenet de la Tocnaye, said, “All the elements are ready,”  “We should integrate it in October 2019 and hope to start testing in 2020. Then we will be able to go to the qualifying clinical tests.”

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

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