Google has filed a patent for contact lenses embedded with a sensor and chip to transmit eye health information.
The patent, filed in September 2012, was granted to the company on March 24. The lens, which has an uneven surface with a chip that can transmit information such as pressure, proximity and temperature, was designed by James Etzkorn, Ph.D., a hardware engineer in Google's research and development department, and Babak Parviz, Ph.D., an affiliate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington and vice president at Amazon. He was on the team that designed Google Glass when he was with the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google from 2010 to 2014.
In some ways, the lens may be a spiritual successor to Google Glass, which was removed from the commercial market in early 2015 because of poor sales. Users could input information into the contact lens computer through a keyboard, key pad, smart device or other remotely connected technologies, and the chip could use logical connections to communicate with one or more remote computers to transmit information, according to the patent.
The chip would be positioned at the edges of the contact in one of the substrates, the uneven portion of the contact. The contact is designed to reduce the amount of plastic over the chip while still protecting the computer parts.
While the patent has been filed, the device has not been built and may spend some time in in development before being tested and brought to market.