The Bionic Contact Lens Technology

Creating Human Reality Changing Possibilities

Bionic Contact Lenses Video

      In 2008 scientists at the University of Washington have created the bionic engineering technological advancement of the prototypic bionic contact lens. These bionic contact lenses are flexible lenses with imprinted electronic circuitry, sensors and LED lights. They are designed to have the desired effect of acting as active contact lenses that aid and monitor health problems, as well as furthering human abilities, all while augmenting reality to enhance the human experience of daily life. These lenses consist of the abilities of: augmenting virtual reality, enhancing visual abilities, eliminating visual deficits in sight, and monitoring biological conditions.

These bionic contact lenses consist of bionic active contact lenses that have the projected ability to create an augmented reality by superimposing computer images as a visual display onto ones natural view. Examples of virtual display would include: drivers or pilots being able to see a vehicle's speed projected onto the windshield, video-game companies able to use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion, and people would be able to surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see. Instead of having to use Google Earth or Global Positioning System (GPS) through a computer or Smartphone, this information could be projected directly into ones eye and natural view of vision. It could give an individual the ability to see a strangers Facebook profile in their stream of vision when sitting right next to them or a review of a restaurant while outside of it so can decide whether want to go in.

     Babak Parviz, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, proposed that miniature cameras with adaptive lenses can be incorporated with the bionic contact lens. These create the ability to zoom in and out, creating superhuman sight or bionic vision for all users. In addition, this technology is paired with sensors to monitor a users biological condition. The bionic contact lenses are able to monitor for such medical conditions as: cardiovascular disease, glucose levels for diabetes, presence of viruses and bacteria, and the condition of an individual’s eyesight. The collected information from this can be transmitted wirelessly to a computer for health practitioners to receive or for the purpose of gathering data. It is proposed that these bionic contact lenses can eliminate all eye problems (short and long sightedness) and blindness. This technology does not actually fix the medical visual problem biologically; rather it gives the individual the ability to overcome the problem by enabling them through the lenses to have proper sight. 

     

Researchers have solved the problem of powering the electronic circuitry of the bionic lens, so that instead of needing a battery that would contain harmful chemicals to the eye, the electronic circuitry instead harvests power from radio waves.  The LED lights are still an issue to be addressed, as they must be activated to be able to perform the virtual display aspects of the bionic contact lens described. The lenses have been activated for twenty minutes in rabbits safely with the rabbits showing no adverse effects; however have not been tested in humans thus far. The LED lights have not been activated in animals yet due to concerns for animal safety, but plans are in motion to do so once scientists can be precisely sure that it is safe.     

Critical Analysis: Haraway’s Human Cyborg Reality

     Haraway would view the technology of bionic contact lenses as a normal advancement in human society, due to Haraway’s notion that all human beings are cyborgs who interface with their environment through artifacts or technology. Thus the advancements in bionic technology are simply progressing the fact that human beings are advancing as cyborgs. The biotic contact lenses are simply an extension of this historical concept. The visual augmented reality functions proposed by the bionic contact lenses are viewed as reality, as both the projected augmented reality visuals and actual social reality visuals are representations of reality. To Haraway this and any further advancement are part of the normal adaptive evolution of machine and human hybrids interfacing with the environment.

Bionics in the Media:

Christina Aguilera 'Bionic' 2010 Album

Christina Aguilera Goes 'Bionic':
Discussion of Women's Bionic/Robotic Characteristics

Critical Analysis: Mainly Obsessed with McLuhan

Larry Sanders of the Milwaukee Bucks Twitter Icon

     Bionic contact lenses are a clear extension of man as this technology furthers human beings abilities and capabilities that they were unable to perform before. Furthermore, these extensions of man change social patterns of human beings as they pose as a choice to human beings that were never possessed before. The choice whether to extend ones sight possibilities through these superhuman sight abilities, masking of ones sight problems, and enabling augmented reality right within ones field of vision is a grand choice posed to humans. This choice changes social patterns as exacerbates social inequality and barriers of race due to the implied prerequisite that only those who have money can afford this technology, thus enhances the unequal divide between the rich and poor.

     McLuhan would state that this medium of the bionic contact lens itself is the message, rather than the context of what exactly the lenses are currently proved to be capable of.  The bionic contact lens is a complicated medium to analyze, as it can be considered both a hot and cool medium for varying reasons. These lenses are a hot medium due to them being a high definition technology that does not leave much to be filled in by ones imagination. Bionic contact lenses enable a human being to see everything one needs to see and access any information one needs, thus do not require much insight of the human being to fill in any gaps of information for themselves. These lenses act as a hot medium as well in regards to monitoring ones medical status and masking eyesight deficits. Humans are passive in these automatic processes, other than the choice to possess them, thus do not actively participate with the technology for these medical aspects.

     In contrast, the bionic contact lens acts as a cool medium through its projected entertainment abilities. These entertainment aspects of being able to visually pull up digital information require high participation by an active user and provide substantial stimulus in its interaction. Within the pilot example, a bionic contact lens would act as a highly interactive medium where the pilot participates with his contact lens to receive speed and location variables projected visually in front of his eyes. This is compared to normal contact lens simply for sight, thus the pilot would require the additional technology of a computer to receive the data of speed and location.

Critical Analysis: Arendt’s Advocate

     In articulating ones reaction to the innovation of bionic contact lenses, one comes to the problem of progress. At first glance, this innovation seems highly progressive and possesses many beneficial enhancements for human beings. As one digs further, it is evident that this innovative development does not actually fix the biological visual problems, rather merely masks these underlying eye conditions to seem corrected to the user. When a user takes out the contact lenses, their eye impairment is unaltered and still at the same level. The troubling idea behind this masking of the true visual problem is what if the condition is progressively getting worse and they are declining in actual visual ability, which would be picked up by the sensors, yet the user may not mind this knowledge as are living through this mask that enables them to see perfectly so it does not affect them directly. The idea is then prompted that what if the visual medical problem gets so impaired while one is wearing these contact lenses that it results in one being unable to live without this robotic aspect of oneself to function daily.

     A mass sentiment reaction described by Arendt to this bionic contact lens technology could be one that it would be more beneficial to spend time on finding actual concrete cures or solutions to these eye generative diseases or impairments in sight, rather than creating elaborate Band-Aid solutions that captivate public interest. This bionic innovation changes the human condition by changing what it means to be human through altering the abilities human beings can posses. The bionic eye produces mixed mass reactions of hope and fear, as humans hope for enhanced medical technologies due to the nostalgia of loved ones suffering from diseases, which can now be altered. This technology challenges ones notion of what it is to be human, which produces a mass reaction of fear for the unknown or artificial as one does not know if this is taking away the originality of the human identity by replacing human functioning with robotics. This fear is spread by the notion that these bionic technologies are turning human beings into possessing the identity of being generated and replaceable mass-produced machines.

Mass Reactions:

Mass Sentiments

 

Political Activist

Scientology Protest

Polish Riot 'Disney' Squad

Critical Analysis: Towards Tenner

     Tenner’s beliefs in bionic contact lenses would be that the confidence in these technological solutions might be misplaced. Technological developments almost always have revenge effects. Revenge effects are the opposite effects or unintended consequences of creating an innovation, which produce the opposite social pattern than the technology was designed to produce and creates new problems or undoes existing solutions to old problems. Tenner urges one to be alert and use vigilant caution when approaching innovations due to revenge effects, as he would when assessing the innovation of bionic contact lenses.

Be Careful!

     Bionic contact lenses are designed to produce the effect of acting as an active contact lens that aids and monitors health problems, while augmenting reality to enhance the human experience. The revenge effect of this is that these contact lenses can produce additional hidden long-lasting health problems (i.e.: from LED light activation on the eye), which would replace the original eye problems with slower-acting, more persistent problems that may not be evident until after many years of wearing the device. A worsening of current visual health problems could result without attempt to fix the actual problem; as this technology only masks the problem thus users will not make any further attempts to treat the actual problem. The revenge effect for monitoring is that it can actually result in producing a systematic lack of care in health care workers. This is due to the fact that health care workers would not have to vigilantly monitor patients to the same degree anymore since these contact lenses measure patients’ vitals automatically. These contact lenses may miss something vital that a trained health worker would have picked up on if were monitoring patients themselves instead of relying on this machine.

    
     The social pattern this technology is intended to produce is of enhancing human beings daily experience. The augmented reality feature of this technology could produce the consequential social pattern of deterring human experience of the real world instead of enhancing their human experience, as could replace human social contact with isolation by making human beings not having to interact with others for information. It could also make an individual desire to live in their augmented reality instead of their real world, thus producing a lowering of actual life satisfaction. Perhaps this could evolve to a type of “The Sims” real-life fictional world experience where people could enable their imagined augmented reality life and refuse to psychologically return to their original existence?

Revenge Effects:

 

Italian Vogue Oil Spill Editorial

Critical Analysis: Conceiving Thoughts of Cowan

     

    Cowan would call bionic contact lenses a technology that produces a medicalization for the wealthy.  Bionic contact lenses exacerbate the social divide that they impose by only being available to the wealthy who can afford to purchase the highly expensive innovative technology. Thus, the wealthy would only benefit from the effects of this technology, which further segregates the rich and the poor access to health benefits. In addition to exacerbating the social class divide, the identity this technology produces also exacerbates the racial divide by being highly available to high-class white citizens and less available to low-class immigrants or ethnic minorities who can barely afford their normal health care. These aspects of identity are written into the design of bionic contact lenses.

     Bionic contact lenses also change the way humans are able to do work. For instance, the job of a pilot or soldier would change drastically with this technology in producing the ability to see graphics in their eye or being able to visually zoom in across spaces to spot enemies. This technology would significantly change how human beings perform their roles in society and abilities within. This technology produces a super human being who would then be expected to perform roles at a higher level, thus disadvantaging those who did not possess this technology in the job market. It would result in a high rate of unemployment for those low-class immigrant or ethnic minorities that are unable to obtain this technology, further exacerbating the social class and race divide. Bionic contact lenses would normalize these super human abilities provided, thus would alter the definition of the natural standard of behavior for human beings. The human identity the bionic contact lens imposes exacerbates the social and race divide by creating another barrier for those who do not have access to this expensive technology. The social identity pursued is one of extreme productivity and superhuman abilities, which may be unrealistic to achieve. The advanced abilities that come with bionic contact lenses would increase human beings amount of work as well, similar to how the computers advancement of abilities in the work place lead to an increase in the expected amount of work to be executed.