BABAK PARVIZ: Good afternoon.
Thank you, [? Astra, ?] for the introduction.
I am Babak Parviz, and I would like to take the next few
minutes and talk to you about a program we worked on for the
past period of time, which involves packing contact
lenses with all sorts of crazy and tiny things to make these
contact lenses a functional platform.
If I can-- slide.
Can you go back, please?
Yeah.
So we've had, actually, a program for some time now to
take a contact lens, which is an interesting
[UNINTELLIGIBLE] piece of engineered polymer, and
attempt to put different types of tiny devices onto it for
two particular reasons.
One is that we believe that this actually can have an
interesting application in health care.
And the second one is the application of a contact lens
that has devices in it for information display.
So I'd like to first tell you why we might be interested in
contact lenses for health care monitoring, then tell you what
happens for information display and give you a few
examples of how we've attempted to actually
implement these devices.
So going back, actually, to what happens
today in health care.
If we feel ill, we'll go visit the physician.
And the first thing that they will do is perhaps take our
pulse or have a look at us.
So do some physical measurements.
That's the first line of data going to the medical
practitioner.
But that's typically not enough.
If they see that there's something wrong, they would
prescribe, perhaps, a blood test or a urine test. So we
need, actually, in order to get a sense of what happens in
people's bodies, we need to have a chemical interface, do
a chemical analysis to get a sense of whether a person is
healthy or not.
Now, if the person is healthy or not, we have to have
devices that would provide that interface to the body and
report the results back.
So how do we do this?
Can we use devices that are outside of the body?
For the most part, these devices, if they're not in
contact with the body, can report a physical parameter.
Maybe I can measure the person's temperature or do
some imaging and try to infer the person's health from the
image I receive.
But that's going to go only so far, so I have to get closer
to the body.
The other option is to do an implant.
And there's many implants, very interesting implants
available today.
But unfortunately, a body actually
reacts to foreign objects.
So anything they implant in the body is going
to face body reaction.
And as of today, we don't really have any sensor that
can last inside the body-- a chemical sensor--
for an extended period of time.
So a matter of days is OK, but we have nothing that can last
for years and years and report the chemical analysis results.
The other option is to put something on the
surface of the body.
And we saw a really interesting talk this morning
about that.
And there's issues with that.
So if we go on the skin, we've all put Band-Aids on out skin,
and actually, you know what happens to the Band-Aid after
a few days.
But there's actually one interface on the surface of
the body that can literally provide us with a window of
what happens inside.
And that's the surface of the eye.
It's a very interesting chemical interface.
Here's a table showing what you may find in your tear film
and what you may find in your blood.
And you immediately notice that a lot of things that are
found in your blood also are found in your tear film.
It's not very surprising, because the surface of the eye
is covered by live cells.
Your body has to keep these cells alive.
So there is actually an interchange between the
surface of your eye and the rest of your body.
So our idea has been that if you could make a contact lens
that could have sensors and do an analysis on the surface of
the eye and report the results back wirelessly, we may be
able to get a sense of what happens inside people's bodies
without actually going inside people's bodies.
And we might be able to do this
continuously at all times.
So one good thing about contact lenses is we already
know that more than 120 million people wear them, and
many people have been wearing them for decades.
So that's a good interface to the body.
That's an acceptable interface to the body.
So we don't really know, actually, what's possible from
this surface.
We know, for example, glucose shows up.
We know lactate shows up.
But we don't really have medicine based on the tear
film or the surface of the eye.
Our medicine is based on blood and acid.
So if we can make this radically new device, we have
to also create the relevant medical knowledge and then
associate with that, create the therapy.
So there is a lot of stuff that we need to do.
But this can, in principle, provide a radically new
interface with the human body, really, probably for the first
time, enabling continuous monitoring of the person's
health and collecting data.
So it could be a good thing.
In the domain of information display, actually, we've been
toying with the idea of, what happens if you put a display
on your contact lens?
So what if I could make a contact lens that could show
me information, and it would talk to my cell phone, and the
cell phone would talk to the tower and the cloud,
eventually, and enable some, at least, level of visual
interaction for the person who's wearing this.
It could be very simple.
Could be just one pixel or a handful of pixels.
It could be much more sophisticated graphics if
someday this is enabled.
And you can think of all sorts of, I think, interesting
applications for a display that you can wear
as a contact lens.
There are some applications, like augmented reality, that
are possible to implement right now even on the cell
phones, that this is something that you would normally see on
your cell phone if you hold up your cell
phone and walk around.
And if you have an augmented reality system, this can
superimpose some extra information, for example, on
the image that you would normally see.
Whether this is possible to implement on a contact lens in
a short time or not, my answer is not a short time.
But the prospects are there.
So we can actually enrich what people normally see with extra
layers of data as they go about their daily lives.
There's another aspect of this, if you could someday put
a display in a contact lens.
And that is, fundamentally, we don't need lots of displays.
So if I think about my daily routine, I wake up in the
morning, I look at my watch, I look at my smartphone.
These are different screens.
I may watch some TV. I drive my car.
It has a dashboard.
I go to work.
I use my laptop.
There are lots of different screens during the day that I
interact with, including billboards.
But what all those things do is to put
something on my retina.
So I don't really need all of those.
I just need one display that's personal to me--
maybe it's in the form of a contact lens-- that shows me
the relevant information.
I just wear my own personal display and just use that one.
So having, actually, a contact lens that does these things--
monitors your health all the time, allows you to be
healthy, or shows you extra layers of information--
sounds like science fiction.
I have to solve a lot of problems in
order to enable this.
I have to make really small devices.
I have to make small radios, antennas,
sensors, light sources.
And I have to integrate all these into the contact lens
and make sure that the whole thing works and the whole
thing is safe and biocompatible.
And to a lot of people, I think this sounds like science
fiction, just not doable.
What I would like to do in the next minute or two is to show
you what we've done, at least attempting to move in this
direction, to make this vision a reality.
One of the things that helps us quite a bit is the
progression of the semiconductor industry.
Really, what it can do is amazing today.
So there's an actual radio built by a group.
These devices can get extremely small.
So in a very tiny area, which is only 450 microns by 450
microns, you can pack quite a bit of function.
So this is an actual radio chip that
does something useful.
So we can actually make really small devices like that that
are not single devices anymore.
They are systems.
The progression of the semiconductor industry and the
ability to make very small semiconductor devices has had
an offshoot, which is using some of these techniques to
make very small sensors.
So today, actually, these are not science fiction anymore.
We can make very small sensors--
some of them are definitely smaller than a single cell--
that can detect a biomolecule.
So we can make small devices.
The third piece of technology that's very relevant--
and we've worked on this, and you heard, actually, a very,
very interesting talk also earlier today on this--
is integration technology.
So we can make small devices.
And we've developed a series of techniques to put these
grains of sand, essentially, in new materials.
They could go on plastic.
They could go on paper.
We've done things on glass.
And bring function to places that normally didn't have. So
we have not traditionally had functional paper or functional
windows and things like that.
And particularly, we use this to make functional plastic
systems in the form of the contact lenses.
So we have a series of technologies that we use that
allow us to miniaturize.
And we have other technologies that allow us to integrate
devices into flexible and unusual substrates.
And if you put them together, we get things like this.
So we can actually today make contact lenses that these are
real contact lenses that have other things in them, in
addition to just being a contact lens
for correcting vision.
The picture on the left is a contact lens that has metal
traces and other things.
On the right, you see how this is tested on
an animal for safety.
And so far, actually, all of our contact
lenses have been safe.
Now, in terms of function, where is it that
we are as of today?
So this is an actual contact lens on
the upper-right corner.
So we can make contact lenses that have really
tiny glucose Sensors.
They have antennas, they have radios, and they
have readout circuits.
We can power these contact lenses remotely with incoming
RF broadcast.
The contact lens wakes up, measures glucose in its
environment, and radios back the results.
So this is a beaker test. We've never tested this on an
animal or a human, but this level of actual technology is
available today.
So it's not science fiction.
We can actually do this.
This is the actual data from one of these contact lenses.
And it looks like a busy slide.
But there's only one point I would like to draw your
attention to, which is the power consumption of these
systems. So we talked about miniaturization and why
miniaturization--
having small devices-- has allowed us to put lots of
function on a contact lens.
But there's actually another thing associated with having
access to really tiny devices, which is these devices consume
very, very tiny amounts of power.
So now, actually, we can do things that were previously
impossible because we have access to ultra low-power
technology.
In this particular system, the whole system operates on three
microwatts.
And a few decades ago, this was noise.
Today, three microwatts is something we use, actually, to
transmit data and run systems. This is actually fundamentally
being enabled by the semiconductor technology.
So real quick, I'll just quickly report on where we are
on the displays.
Displays are very difficult, actually, to construct on
contact lenses.
The first thing that you would say is that it's impossible to
even bring into focus.
Because how do I bring an image into focus from
something that's directly on my eye?
Which is a very valid point.
So what we do, actually, in the display domain, is to
pack-- again, use miniaturization technology to
pack other types of optical components on the surface of
the contact lens, including Fresnel lenses.
So on the lower-right corner, you see a rabbit that is
wearing a contact lens that has also some other optical
components in it to manipulate the image that comes in.
And at least we've been able to show that computationally,
you can have an image that is in focus.
So one takeaway from this is that traditionally, spectacles
have been simple lenses.
We don't have to stay there.
With the miniaturization technology, we can pack a lot
of other optical devices in a contact lens and help people
see in a different way.
And this was a simulation result of how you might
actually see through a contact lens that has a displayed that
just basically shows you the letter E.
I'd like to end by showing you a quick movie.
So we can get the movie going.
This is a contact lens system fully packaged.
This is RF powered.
We have our custom-designed light sources integrated into
the context lens It has radios.
We can power this up.
We can control it.
And we have a pixel that we can control on
these contact lenses.
So we have two colors.
Right now we can have only blue and red.
And I guess it's a stretch of imagination, really, to call a
single-pixel display a display, but that's at the
moment the state of the art.
So with that, I would like to thank you for your attention.
And hopefully, I've been able to convince you that there are
some really interesting things that we can do on the surface
of the eye.
Thank you.
MALE SPEAKER: Let us define x.
x is a solution, a solution to a seemingly insurmountable
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But what if we redefine x as a challenge, an opportunity for
radical thinking, a chance to light up the world with
breakthrough ideas and cutting-edge technology, the
stuff of science fiction that just might fly after all.
Solving for x requires wonder and imagination and the vision
to build seemingly impossible solutions to the world's
biggest problems. Solve for x.
Moonshot thinking.