Smart Contact Lenses 109
Iddo Genuth writes "Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have recently designed a contact lens prototype with a built-in pressure sensor using a novel process that etches tiny electrical circuits within a soft polymer material. The new development could help glaucoma patients to measure their current risk factor, thus replacing the current methods which require constant visits to a clinician."
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In other news.... (Score:5, Informative)
The test is a probe they touch your eye with; it appears that these lenses are a miniature version. The probe used by eye doctors connects to a kleenex box-sized device with an LCD readout. You will be given this test before and after cataract surgery and vitrectomy surgery.
Your pressure should be between 10 and 20 (10 and 20 what I don't know). After my vitrectomy surgery (NSFW) [slashdot.org] my occular pressure was 35, very dangerously high. I wasn't prescribed reefer, but rather some large, expensive orange pills.
Re:Ow my eyes (Score:2, Informative)
Did you enjoy your first drag, or was it relatively unpleasant?
Like anything else, if you practice, you get used to it. (I haven't worn contacts in a while, but I just reached up and touched my eyeball, didn't really bother me any)
Re:Ow my eyes (Score:5, Informative)
Contacts are greatly superior to glasses in a couple important ways.
First, they give you a much better field of corrected vision. Almost any pair of glasses will have large gaps around the edges, and the styles popular today are particularly bad as they tend to be small. Any pair of glasses that covers the entire range that your eyeball can point will look extremely ridiculous. Practically, this means that you must move your head a lot more to see things clearly when you're wearing glasses. As a pilot, the increased field of corrected vision achieved by contact lenses is by itself sufficient advantage to justify using them.
Second, distortion. Glasses distort everything within the area that they correct. How much they distort depends exactly on how big they are and how strong they are. If you have strong, large glasses then there is significant distortion around the outside edges which can be distracting. If you instead use smaller glasses, then this is better but the field of view problem I discussed above is worse. If your glasses offer only mild correction then this isn't so important.
The "sticking something in your eye" thing is vastly overstated. It's just not a very big deal. Modern contact lenses are soft and conform to your eye's shape. They are designed to be wet and to retain water like the rest of your eye. When they are in it is difficult to feel that they are there, although if you are nearsighted then you can often feel the rim of the lenses as your eyes move. This feeling is not uncomfortable once you get used to it, which just takes a few minutes the first time you use them, and decreases to zero as you continue to wear them. Getting them in and out is also not a big deal once you practice it a bit. My first week started out with each morning and night being an adventure in getting the lenses in and out, and by the end of the week it was pretty easy. Now it takes me just a few seconds per eye and there is no discomfort. Done properly, your fingers only ever touch the lens, not your eye. So the eye only touches the lens, which is wet and made from a material that doesn't irritate the eye.
I regularly wear both, and I can tell you that the problems with glasses are just as big as the problems with contact lenses, it's just that you're used to the glasses and contact lenses are foreign to you. Sometimes if I wear my contacts for a couple of days straight, switching to glasses makes me dizzy for a few minutes due to the distortion. You got used to that distortion, and you'll get used to contacts if you care to try them. Personally I recommend it.
Re:In other news.... (Score:2, Informative)