Google Files Patent For Injecting A Device Directly Into Your Eyeball (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: It's no secret Google and their parent company Alphabet are interested in developing smart contact lenses for monitoring diabetes. Well, Google-parent Alphabet has filed a patent which takes their development to another level. The patent specifically covers a method for "injecting a fluid into a lens capsule of an eye, wherein a natural lens of the eye has been removed from the lens capsule." It's powered by "radio frequency energy" received by a small antenna inside. The gadget even has its own data storage. Forbes reports, it is designed to help the focusing of light onto the retina, resulting in the correction of poor vision. Samsung is one of the most recent companies to receive a patent for smart contact lenses. Their lenses are for experimenting with new methods of delivering augmented reality interfaces and data.

Comments

It's not shocking, and I'll tell you what it does

[steveha]

TFA expressed shock that someone might have their natural lens removed. This is a routine operation, usually done because of cataracts.

My wife has had this done. She developed cataracts at a relatively young age, and they got bad enough that the insurance company signed off on the cataract surgery.

Noteworthy in my wife's case: we paid the extra money to get a vision-correcting lens in each eye. The usual replacement lens is a neutral lens, but her eyes are now correcting her vision from the inside. Before she had this procedure, she needed glasses all the time for everything. (Or contact lenses of course.) After the procedure, she only needs glasses for reading; they had to pick a distance for the correction to work at, and the default is to leave you able to walk around and drive and such without glasses, but need glasses to read. (Makes sense to me!)

She now has the best vision she has ever had in her life. She grumbles about needing reading glasses but I remind her she used to need glasses all the time for everything; this is a win.

I am seriously considering having this done myself as an elective procedure. I have some presbyopia and I now need glasses to read fine print. There are artificial lenses available that are flexible and restore the ability to focus on near things; these are called accommodating intra-ocular lenses (IOLs). It would be nice to get my close-up vision back. In the USA the available accommodating IOL is called the Crystalens.

I have been calling my wife a "cyborg" as she now has technological lenses rather than natural ones.

Returning to the news story: TFA is absolutely terrible, just awful. It fails to answer the most basic question: what is the purpose of this invention? The link given in TFS shows what seems to be a one-page PDF, but if you use the crude-looking navigation controls on the left you can browse forward and backward through the patent.

http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20160113760

Pub. No.: US 2016/0113760 A1
Pub. Date: Apr. 28, 2016
Filed: Oct. 24, 2014

Here's the abstract. The PDF appears to be all image, no selectable text, so I just typed all this in.

An intra-ocular device includes an electronic lens that can be controlled to control the overall optical power of the device. The device can be installed within a flexible polymeric material shaped to conform to the inside surface of a lens capsule of an eye. Accommodation forces applied to the device and/or polymeric material via the lens capsule can cause a change in the optical power of the device and/or polymeric material. Further, such accommodation forces can be detected by an accommodation sensor of the device and the optical power of the electronic lens can be controlled based on the detected accommodation forces. Operated in this way, the device and polymeric material can restore a degree of accommodation to the eye that is related to existing mechanisms for controlling such accommodation, i.e., forces exerted by the eye via the lens capsule.

If I'm understanding that correctly, this is a very complicated way to get a lens that adjusts its focus in response to the normal movements of muscles in the eye to adjust focus.

I don't know why someone would want this rather than a purely passive device like a CrystalLens. I guess this would be more fine-tunable, so might provide the ultimate in vision focus; but it's tremendously more complex and would seem to require an external power supply, rather than being a simple piece of flexible clear material (of just the right shape and implanted in just the right place).

Speculation: this m