Powering electronic contact lenses: current achievements, challenges, and perspectives

Abstract

The recent media hoopla regarding ‘smart’, ‘bionic’, or more appropriately, electronically augmented contact lenses is analyzed in terms of real achievements coupled to the critically important issue of power management. Not depending on the availability, currently or in the near future, of to-the-purpose discrete or integrated electronic devices, power management, including delivery/supply and temporal sustainability, will be an outstanding issue if present-day technology should remain the only option. Radically different approaches have been taken to deliver electric power to electronically augmented contact lenses, that is, ranging from quite simplistic wire-based delivery assemblies, grossly inappropriate for end users, to various elaborate wireless designs drawing on over-the-air power delivery, as well as solar and electrochemical cells. Nonetheless, given the complex restrictions offered by a contact lens, conventional, even state-of-the-art, power management technology is at an impasse, and to ensure a bright future for smart lenses, radical technological measures need to be taken. Bridging the conceptual gap between fuel cells and supercapacitors, an ingenious novel approach to on-lens power management is presented: a charge-storing fuel cell, or alternatively, a self-charging capacitor, that is, a hybrid electric power device.

Keywords::

• battery
• electrical energy
• electrochemical cell
• fuel cell
• hybrid electric power device
• over-the-air electric power
• smart contact lens
• solar cell
• supercapacitor

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties. No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Key issues

• Prototypes of smart electronic contact lenses are demonstrated.

• Conventional batteries cannot be used to power bionic lenses.

• Wireless (over-the-air) electric power supply is used nowadays in combination with incorporated conventional capacitors.

• Solar and fuel cells are reported as one of the possible approaches.

• Newly reported hybrid electric power sources (self-charging supercapacitors or charge-storing fuel cells) seem to be the best devices to power bionic lenses.