3D-Printed LED-Equipped Contact Lens

3D-Printed LED-Equipped Contact Lens
Dec-13-14
A 3D printed contact lens embedded with LEDs serves as proof that complex electronics can be integrated into equally complex materials.

To create the lens, the team first had to tackle the problem of using very different materials to print live electronics. As the Yong Lin Kong, the study's lead author explained, a method of shaping one material—heat, for example—could damage nearby materials. Using both "off-the-shelf and really fancy" materials, the team built a hybrid printer able to successfully print the array of materials. After scanning an image of a lens and feeding the information to the printer, the lens was printed using quantum dots to create the LEDs.

The lens is too rigid to actually use in the eye and would also require an external power source, but it serves its original purpose. According to Michael McAlpine, lead researcher for the project: "This shows that we can use 3-D printing to create complex electronics including semiconductors We were able to 3-D print an entire device, in this case an LED."

More Info about this Invention:

[IEEE.ORG]
[PRINCETON.EDU]
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