Regular, passive contact lenses are ophthalmic devices used to correct vision disorders
such as myopia and hyperopia. From their inception in 1888, research eorts
were focused on increasing their comfort, performance and ease of manufacturing,
but their purpose rarely diverted to other applications than vision correction.
However, after World War II, a new use found its way into the lab when one
sought to extend their function by integrating electronic components. Unfortunately,
none of the initial eorts resulted in a successful implementation beyond
research prototyping. In retrospect, it seems the major limiting factor was a lack
of adequate microfabrication technologies for constructing the micro-electronic
components themselves and for successfully embedding them in a contact lens.
However, around 2000 these technologies appeared to have caught up with the
ideas and designs of several researchers and a new upsurge in electronic contact
lens studies has since been seen.
The application domains of these so-called ’smart’ contact lenses have up till
now been mainly limited to biomedical sensing and augmented reality. While
the added value of augmented reality is less clear at this point and certainly
needs much more research, the opportunities for biomedical sensing are more
obvious and are likely to expand in the coming years. Strangely, it appears one
large application domain has not been investigated yet, namely vision correction.
Conventional contact lenses were specically developed to correct ophthalmic
disorders such as myopia and hyperopia, but the question emerges whether
smart contact lenses can outperform them in terms of vision correction. After
an initial round-up of existing research and the identication of potential future
applications in the domain of active vision correction, a clear starting point was
found: the development of a basic non-emitting electro-optic technology which
could be integrated into a contact lens.
After an initial survey of existing display technologies, we found that LCD
technology provides the best t with the desired properties for integration into a