The Future. It is happening in a building next door...

[elfs]

Creepy Blue Bulding

There's a building across the street from where I work, a blue building sometimes harassed by protestors, because that blue building is where the University of Washington conducts its animal testing.

A team at the UW consisting of both medical and electical engineering researchers has now created a contact lens with integrated circuits. The're working on minimizing it to provide a complete heads-up display capability that is wearable, receives data over a PAN (personal area network), and is powered by photovoltaic arrays around the perimeter of the lens.

I wonder if we couldn't put a decent-resolution camera on there too, to capture everything the wearer sees at will. On the one hand, this would make for some nice occassions: never lose photos of a birthday party, keep track of what you actually bought (and looked at) at a grocery store-- you might even be able to sell that information to store layout optimizers. But it would also have other, odder implications. Privacy would plummet further. Every time you drove like a jerk, a dozen people would have your license plate number on record. The essential anonymity of driving-- you're just a license plate number most people can't look up-- would be gone.

You could put other things in there too. What if the camera looked inward? A lot of common disease manifest in vision troubles: glaucoma, diabetes, high blood pressure would all have early-warning systems associated with them.

It's ten years out before these systems do more than just blink lights into eyes. But they're already testing live systems today. Science fiction has just been delivered.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I'd settle for a decent "Gav Cam" (http://www.nukees.com/d/19981111.html)

Hey, my phone has BlueTooth, and mofifying a set of these... (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/a0f3/)

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Sounds like David Brin's Earth, and right around the right time, too. He's done some interesting essays on the concept of privacy and what's going to happen to it in the future.

[taerin.livejournal.com]

Oh, MAN I want a pair of those! For something that useful, I'll put up with putting eyedrops in every few minutes.

[eddvick.livejournal.com]

I had arranged for Prof Babak Parviz of the UW dept of Electrical Engineering, to come to Foolscap this year and tell us all about these contacts, but he got invited to give a talk in Europe the same reason, and for some reason utterly beyond me decided to travel instead.

a post-humanist question

[tehrasha.livejournal.com]

How close would you say we are, to having lasik surgery and cochlear implants that excede 'normal' visual and auido capability, to the point that people will want them done as elective surgeries?

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I don't think they'd be able to put anything fancier than a display into those contacts, for two reasons:

1) If you're going to use light as your power source, that's extremely limited, especially considering that only a small fraction of the surface area of the contact lens (itself extremely small, as solar arrays go) can be used for collecting light for this purpose. And increasing the amount of light it collects (ie by focusing more light into that surface area, as with a lens) will likely have negative effects on the wearer.

2) That power will get gobbled up by the display and/or radio receiver, leaving little if anything left for anything else. To be able to do even this much would require a vast improvement in the power requirements for doing both of these functions over today's technology.

As for removing the "inherent anonymity of driving"... well, that's kind of like saying that you'd be removing the inherent anonymity of arson, for the same reasons. Normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad, after all.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

IIRC, someone actually tried gluing small magnets to some poor grad student's eyelids, so that blinking energized a photo-lithographed 2-D coil on a lens. A lower-power version merely included piezoelectric film, again generating a charge as it deformed with each blink.

Tears don't have any useful material to use as fuel, but body fluids could power other devices. My biomedical engineering professor liked the concept of fuel cells pulling glucose from your bloodstream. To burn off excess calories, you could just leave your implanted cell phone and web server turned on all night.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Yup! The only problem is harvesting it in a manner that is a) easy to install, b) will last for a lifetime with no maintenance, and c) will not cause harm in both normal operating conditions and in failure mode.

You could indeed run wires through someone's body and connect them to diodes to convert the electropotential differences in muscle tissue into a small but usable amount of current. However, my prof told us of one paraplegic guy had very thin gold wires threaded through his leg muscles as part of an experiment. If he still had sensation there, it would have been very painful to install (criteria a). The wires eventually broke due to fatigue failure as twitching muscles flexed them (criteria b). The broken bits of wire then migrated through muscle tissue, puncturing blood vessels and eventually poking through the skin (criteria c).

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[resonant.livejournal.com]

The electrodes gradually dissolve as part of the reaction, so you'd have to pick ones whose ions aren't harmful to the body, and only use them in applications where the electrodes could be readily replaced. Contact lenses are actually an ideal application for that - tears would make a good electrolyte, and you'd be removing and replacing the lenses daily, so electrode life wouldn't be a concern. Good idea!

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Same here - we'll be the technologically unfashionable ones, having to use heads-up displays projected onto the lenses of our glasses.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Oh - a tip from my professor: implanting a small power-generating turbine into an artery doesn't work. The turbulence will damage red blood cells. He was working on a peristaltic generator, but I don't know if he ever got it working.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that someone had worked out the correct design for blood-ready propellers for axial heart pumps. It was that article that led me to write that Pendorians don't have a pulse when sleeping.

Here we are: An Artificial Heart that Doesn't Beat (http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17523&ch=biotech).

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Wow - impressive!