Hydrogel-Based Smart Contact Lens for Highly Sensitive Wireless Intraocular Pressure Monitoring

Real-time intraocular pressure (IOP) monitoring plays a crucial role in glaucoma diagnosis and treatment. The wireless smart contact lens based on a flexible inductor-capacitor- resistor (LCR) sensor is chip-free and battery-free, demonstrating excellent application potential for physiological signal monitoring. To promote the use of LCR contact lenses for clinical IOP monitoring, reliable, comfortable contact lens materials should be used and excellent sensitivity needs to be realized. Here, we propose a method for producing hydrogel-based smart contact lenses for wireless IOP monitoring that uses the conformal stacking technique, solving the problems of swelling of the hydrogel and spherical integration of the pyramid-microstructured dielectric elastomer. The IOP of the in vitro porcine eye is successfully monitored owing to the high sensitivity of the spherical pyramid-microstructured capacitive pressure sensor and the hydrogel substrate. In addition, a glasses-integrated impedance-matching tunable reader for remote signal measurement is realized by enhancing the signal amplitude and increasing the reading distance, improving the portability of the signal measurement equipment. With the above improved designs, the wireless contact lens system has application potential for clinical IOP monitoring and shows substantial promise for next-generation daily ocular health management.

Automated summary

This research proposes a method for producing hydrogel-based smart contact lenses that can monitor intraocular pressure wirelessly. The contact lenses show excellent potential for clinical application and promise for next-generation daily ocular health management.