Imagine: a glucose monitor for diabetics directly on the eye. Cholesterol checking or infection detection. Blood screening available anytime. Even a computer display.

Health monitoring contact lens on a rabbit’s eye.  Picture courtesy of University of Washington

This is the vision of Babak Parviz, an innovation professor and researcher at the University of Washington. During his presentation, “What if your contact lenses could show you images …”  at the August colloquium at the NASA Langley Reid Conference Center, Parviz explained new technology being developed that someday will be integrated into devices millions use now to avoid wearing glasses.

“With our expertise, which is in building really tiny devices, we are interested in turning a contact lens into a functional system that does a lot more than just improve vision,” Parviz said.

“A lot of people may not know that the surface of the eye is covered by live cells,” Parviz said of the initial push toward biomedical monitoring. “Every time that you see something, light from the outside is going through live cells of your body to reach the retina in your eye.”

Sensors on the contact lenses could monitor the body chemistry and gather information that will determine the health status of the person.

“In a sense, you can monitor what happens in the body without going inside,” Parviz said.

Information display is in the more distant future. For example, it’s possible that a computer screen will be part of a contact lens, rather than a person depending on a display on a computer monitor or a smart phone.

The ultimate goal is to produce an energy-efficient, lightweight, non-intrusive device that is affordable, disposable and works continuously.

This is by no means a simple task.

“It’s absolutely not science fiction anymore,” Parviz said. “We are talking about constructing very sophisticated contact lenses.”