Old Cyborgs Will Soon Roam Cities

Researchers place the final development stage of the artificial lens that would be able to restore a perfect vision both to short- and long-sighted people 5 years from now.



With age, human sight becomes less accurate, mainly due to the fact that the lens of the human eye becomes harder and less flexible. Since the 1950s, people (mostly aged over 40) suffering from long-sightedness and even cataract, as their natural eye lenses became cloudy, have been implanted hard artificial correcting lenses. The trouble with these was that they only came in a single focal range. Laser surgery technology also helped by modifying lens shape, but it couldn't compete with natural aging effects. As such, it's still a temporary solution.



In order to answer nature, a series of researchers yielded very good results. Aston University's professor James Wolffsohn, for example, in collaboration with some opthology companies, is currently undergoing the development of a flexible artificial lens able to provide both long and short focal corrections to patients. In his opinion, the device will be readied within 5 to 10 years from now, which means that for less than £1,000 (1250 Euros or $1750) everyone could have their sight permanently adjusted.



Another team, under the command of professors John Rogers at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and Yonggang Huang of Northwestern University in Evanston, used particular processing and electrical materials in unusual designs in order to obtain high levels of stretchability and compressibility due to a flexible mesh of sensors connected by tiny wires. Each sensor acted as a pixel for the obtained camera. This "stretchable electronics" technique allows for its usage on the most various surfaces, shapes and environments. The images it provides have a broader field of view as well as fewer to no distortions.



This technology is easy to apply in all prosthetics fields, not only for human eyes. As Rogers says, "We believe that some of the most compelling areas of future application involve the intimate, conformal integration of electronics with the human body, in ways that are inconceivable using established technologies. This approach allows us to put electronics in places where we couldn't before. We can now, for the first time, move device design beyond the flatland constraints of conventional systems."