Scientists hailing from Nanjing, China, have engineered smart content lenses with eye-tracking capabilities based on radio frequency tags, offering versatile applications in fields like healthcare and augmented reality (AR). These lenses, seamlessly integrated and biocompatible, require no battery or traditional silicon chips.
Smart contact lenses, a burgeoning technology facilitating health monitoring and human-machine interaction (HMI), represent a recent innovation. Traditional methods for tracking eye movements, such as pupil center corneal reflection and electrooculography (EOG), though utilized, exhibit limitations in accuracy and susceptibility to interference. Additionally, EOG, employing skin electrodes, poses risks to the skin.
A recent study published in Nature Communications addresses these challenges associated with conventional eye-tracking methods.
Professor Fei Xu, a co-author of the study from the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Nanjing University, discussed the motivation behind developing smart contact lenses in an interview with Tech Xplore. He highlighted how science fiction, particularly in movies like “Mission: Impossible 4,” depicting smart contact lenses with facial recognition capabilities, fuels scientific imagination and creativity.
Human-machine interaction (HMI) stands at the forefront of technological advancement, shaping the future of human-machine collaboration. HMI explores ways to enhance communication between humans and machines, impacting various domains, including gaming, healthcare, AR, and robotics. Eye-tracking through smart contact lenses emerges as a pivotal method to facilitate HMI, offering benefits like health parameter monitoring, improved robot communication, and immersive AR experiences.
To address the limitations of conventional eye-tracking methods, researchers propose a frequency-encoding approach.
Frequency encoding involves embedding radio frequency (RF) tags within the contact lenses to encode information about eye movements into RF signals. These RF tags, akin to RFID chips, emit wireless signals corresponding to different eye movements or positions. By detecting changes in the emitted signal frequency as the eye moves, the system can accurately track eye movements in real time. This method ensures precise tracking without the need for conventional silicon chips or batteries, enhancing the compactness, lightweight nature, and biocompatibility of smart contact lenses.
Additionally, this frequency encoding method ensures data security, eliminating the risk of iris or biometric information leakage. The lenses demonstrate high angular accuracy and stability, capable of detecting eye commands for broader HMI applications. In-vivo experiments conducted in rabbits confirm the lenses’ functionality and safety, emphasizing their potential for diverse applications in human-computer interaction and medical health.plications”
