LEDE: Your contact lenses might one day be engineered with technologies that do more than correct vision.
Randy Atkins: Devices attached to or implanted in our bodies would be great for monitoring vital signs, but generally cant hold enough power to pass along information via Wi-Fi. Now Vamsi Talla, a University of Washington engineer, is developing a way for, say, contact lenses to send signals without the need for batteries.
Vamsi Talla: One of the goals that our research lab looks at is how we can embed connectivity in all objects around you.
Randy Atkins: The new method, called interscatter communication, allows a contact lens or other objects to reflect Bluetooth signals from a nearby device like a smartwatchand transform them into Wi-Fi signals that can be read by your smartphone or laptop.
Vamsi Talla: With interscatter, we showed for the first time that we can actually get communication at 10-thousand times lower power.
