The journey is almost over. This will be my last entry for computer studies. Throughout this course, I have learned more about software, ethics and technology in general overall than I could have ever hoped. Although it was sometimes daunting, and the tests were confusing, I still found that it was easier to cope with compared to my other classes. I enjoyed the Mr. Fernandez’s methods of teachings and was found it to be an enjoyable class overall. I liked this class so much that I am considering doing a similar course next year if Mr. Fernandez continues to teach.

The Russian scientist Aleksandr Syomochkin from Blagoveshchensk Teachers’ Training University has created a program that enables computer to discern people and convey messages to them.

The invention in future will be able to have full-fledged conversations with people. The computer discerns people’s faces by means of monitor cameras. The more cameras there are, the more detailed features of the “seen” people will remain in the computer’s memory.

The program already works in the university’s laboratory of information technologies. Within a minute hundreds of the visitor’s pictures are downloaded from six cameras. The program named Iscanderus Visius remembers face features, mimic, and gestures of every object.

Aleksandr Syomochkin is not going to patent his invention: “It is not necessary to patent everything: sometimes you can just make your invention available to people for free, so that they can take it and create something new on its basis” – he said.

After a two weeks of winter vacation it was difficult to quickly adjust to life at school. During computer studies. We jumped directly into Fireworks and learned about the basics of photo and image editing as well as the differences between vector and bitmap images. On top of all that we were given a short lecture and reading about Bitmap/Vector graphic formats. Though it was challenging at times, it found it to be very interesting compared to html. The most difficult aspect would be to remember all the different formats and the large amount of vocabulary associated with this unit.

So much has happened this week at computer studies.  When we were first introduced to HTML near the end of last week, I was overwhelmed by the large amounts of code and procedures we need to follow. But during the first few days of this week, I was able to comprehend most of that stuff fairly quickly. I guess it is because I had done these things last year. I completed my assignment with ease and actually enjoyed doing it. Doing HTML for me is for sure, one of the the highlights of this course. I hope to do more during my winter vaction and maybe even learn ahead.

On another note, WINTER VACTION IS HERE!!! Grade ten has been hard and I early look forward to the days I am going to have off.  To celebrate Christmas comming up, I would like share the christmas card I made myself.

The bionic i-Limb hand has been a revelation amid the amputees, so sensing the need to do more for the ones with missing digits, Touch Bionics— the inventors of the i-Limb — have developed the motor-powered ProDigits, the world’s first set of bionic fingers with the dedicated purpose of facilitating lives of people with missing fingers.

The Terminator-like prosthetic hand will help the partial hand amputees regain the feel of the fingers, and once fitted with the ProDigits, they will be able to grip, bend, touch, pick up and point with its assistance. The ProDigits is attached to whatever part of the hand is affected the using myoelectric sensors which detect muscle signals of the remaining unaffected hand to control itself, the prosthetic function just like the real hand.

It is Thursday night. I am trying to get as much studying done as possible since I have a computer studies and math test tommorrow morining. I am trying the finish this blog as fast as possible so I can go the sleep. This week I learned quite abit about computer networking, its benifits, the types of topology and many other terms reguarding the subject. It was a hard week but it was still productive overall. We were giving a lot of homework but if was nothing overwhelming. Tommorrow after our test, I the class will begin their lesson on html. I did quite a bit of html in Mr.Car’s Class last year but I have forgotten most of the major concepts. Hopefully with this refresher I will be able to regain of the the memory that I have lost.

Peace Out

No two weeks at computer studies is ever ths same for me. After watching a movie made in 1983 called wargames reguarding computer ethics, I was bare giving enough time to finish my writeup on the movie. The movie was horribly acted and the situations it presents are outrageous and unimaginable. Later I was giving another big project and was assigned two partners. One of them barely did anything, and the otherone did nothing. Not my best week but the good point are that I learned quite a  bit about ethics, laws and how networking works. I hope to learn more about these things in the future.

Image: Raygun Studio

BY Babak A. Parviz // September 2009

The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.

But why stop there?

In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field—virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes.

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.

These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

Besides visual enhancement, noninvasive monitoring of the wearer’s biomarkers and health indicators could be a huge future market. We’ve built several simple sensors that can detect the concentration of a molecule, such as glucose. Sensors built onto lenses would let diabetic wearers keep tabs on blood-sugar levels without needing to prick a finger. The glucose detectors we’re evaluating now are a mere glimmer of what will be possible in the next 5 to 10 years. Contact lenses are worn daily by more than a hundred million people, and they are one of the only disposable, mass-market products that remain in contact, through fluids, with the interior of the body for an extended period of time. When you get a blood test, your doctor is probably measuring many of the same biomarkers that are found in the live cells on the surface of your eye—and in concentrations that correlate closely with the levels in your bloodstream. An appropriately configured contact lens could monitor cholesterol, sodium, and potassium levels, to name a few potential targets. Coupled with a wireless data transmitter, the lens could relay information to medics or nurses instantly, without needles or laboratory chemistry, and with a much lower chance of mix-ups.

Three fundamental challenges stand in the way of building a multipurpose contact lens. First, the processes for making many of the lens’s parts and subsystems are incompatible with one another and with the fragile polymer of the lens. To get around this problem, my colleagues and I make all our devices from scratch. To fabricate the components for silicon circuits and LEDs, we use high temperatures and corrosive chemicals, which means we can’t manufacture them directly onto a lens. That leads to the second challenge, which is that all the key components of the lens need to be miniaturized and integrated onto about 1.5 square centimeters of a flexible, transparent polymer. We haven’t fully solved that problem yet, but we have so far developed our own specialized assembly process, which enables us to integrate several different kinds of components onto a lens. Last but not least, the whole contraption needs to be completely safe for the eye. Take an LED, for example. Most red LEDs are made of aluminum gallium arsenide, which is toxic. So before an LED can go into the eye, it must be enveloped in a biocompatible substance.

So far, besides our glucose monitor, we’ve been able to batch-fabricate a few other nanoscale biosensors that respond to a target molecule with an electrical signal; we’ve also made several microscale components, including single-crystal silicon transistors, radio chips, antennas, diffusion resistors, LEDs, and silicon photodetectors. We’ve constructed all the micrometer-scale metal interconnects necessary to form a circuit on a contact lens. We’ve also shown that these microcomponents can be integrated through a self-assembly process onto other unconventional substrates, such as thin, flexible transparent plastics or glass. We’ve fabricated prototype lenses with an LED, a small radio chip, and an antenna, and we’ve transmitted energy to the lens wirelessly, lighting the LED. To demonstrate that the lenses can be safe, we encapsulated them in a biocompatible polymer and successfully tested them in trials with live rabbits.

Photos: University of Washington

Second Sight:

In recent trials, rabbits wore lenses containing metal circuit structures for 20 minutes at a time with no adverse effects.

Seeing the light—LED light—is a reasonable accomplishment. But seeing something useful through the lens is clearly the ultimate goal. Fortunately, the human eye is an extremely sensitive photodetector. At high noon on a cloudless day, lots of light streams through your pupil, and the world appears bright indeed. But the eye doesn’t need all that optical power—it can perceive images with only a few microwatts of optical power passing through its lens. An LCD computer screen is similarly wasteful. It sends out a lot of photons, but only a small fraction of them enter your eye and hit the retina to form an image. But when the display is directly over your cornea, every photon generated by the display helps form the image.

The beauty of this approach is obvious: With the light coming from a lens on your pupil rather than from an external source, you need much less power to form an image. But how to get light from a lens? We’ve considered two basic approaches. One option is to build into the lens a display based on an array of LED pixels; we call this an active display. An alternative is to use passive pixels that merely modulate incoming light rather than producing their own. Basically, they construct an image by changing their color and transparency in reaction to a light source. (They’re similar to LCDs, in which tiny liquid-crystal ”shutters” block or transmit white light through a red, green, or blue filter.) For passive pixels on a functional contact lens, the light source would be the environment. The colors wouldn’t be as precise as with a white-backlit LCD, but the images could be quite sharp and finely resolved.

We’ve mainly pursued the active approach and have produced lenses that can accommodate an 8-by-8 array of LEDs. For now, active pixels are easier to attach to lenses. But using passive pixels would significantly reduce the contact’s overall power needs—if we can figure out how to make the pixels smaller, higher in contrast, and capable of reacting quickly to external signals.

By now you’re probably wondering how a person wearing one of our contact lenses would be able to focus on an image generated on the surface of the eye. After all, a normal and healthy eye cannot focus on objects that are fewer than 10 centimeters from the corneal surface. The LEDs by themselves merely produce a fuzzy splotch of color in the wearer’s field of vision. Somehow the image must be pushed away from the cornea. One way to do that is to employ an array of even smaller lenses placed on the surface of the contact lens. Arrays of such microlenses have been used in the past to focus lasers and, in photolithography, to draw patterns of light on a photoresist. On a contact lens, each pixel or small group of pixels would be assigned to a microlens placed between the eye and the pixels. Spacing a pixel and a microlens 360 micrometers apart would be enough to push back the virtual image and let the eye focus on it easily. To the wearer, the image would seem to hang in space about half a meter away, depending on the microlens.

Another way to make sharp images is to use a scanning microlaser or an array of microlasers. Laser beams diverge much less than LED light does, so they would produce a sharper image. A kind of actuated mirror would scan the beams from a red, a green, and a blue laser to generate an image. The resolution of the image would be limited primarily by the narrowness of the beams, and the lasers would obviously have to be extremely small, which would be a substantial challenge. However, using lasers would ensure that the image is in focus at all times and eliminate the need for microlenses.

Whether we use LEDs or lasers for our display, the area available for optoelectronics on the surface of the contact is really small: roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter. The display must also be semitransparent, so that wearers can still see their surroundings. Those are tough but not impossible requirements. The LED chips we’ve built so far are 300 µm in diameter, and the light-emitting zone on each chip is a 60-µm-wide ring with a radius of 112 µm. We’re trying to reduce that by an order of magnitude. Our goal is an array of 3600 10-µm-wide pixels spaced 10 µm apart.

One other difficulty in putting a display on the eye is keeping it from moving around relative to the pupil. Normal contact lenses that correct for astigmatism are weighted on the bottom to maintain a specific orientation, give or take a few degrees. I figure the same technique could keep a display from tilting (unless the wearer blinked too often!).

Like all mobile electronics, these lenses must be powered by suitable sources, but among the options, none are particularly attractive. The space constraints are acute. For example, batteries are hard to miniaturize to this extent, require recharging, and raise the specter of, say, lithium ions floating around in the eye after an accident. A better strategy is gathering inertial power from the environment, by converting ambient vibrations into energy or by receiving solar or RF power. Most inertial power scavenging designs have unacceptably low power output, so we have focused on powering our lenses with solar or RF energy.

Let’s assume that 1 square centimeter of lens area is dedicated to power generation, and let’s say we devote the space to solar cells. Almost 300 microwatts of incoming power would be available indoors, with potentially much more available outdoors. At a conversion efficiency of 10 percent, these figures would translate to 30 µW of available electrical power, if all the subsystems of the contact lens were run indoors.

Collecting RF energy from a source in the user’s pocket would improve the numbers slightly. In this setup, the lens area would hold antennas rather than photovoltaic cells. The antennas’ output would be limited by the field strengths permitted at various frequencies. In the microwave bands between 1.5 gigahertz and 100 GHz, the exposure level considered safe for humans is 1 milliwatt per square centimeter. For our prototypes, we have fabricated the first generation of antennas that can transmit in the 900-megahertz to 6-GHz range, and we’re working on higher-efficiency versions. So from that one square centimeter of lens real estate, we should be able to extract at least 100 µW, depending on the efficiency of the antenna and the conversion circuit.

Having made all these subsystems work, the final challenge is making them all fit on the same tiny polymer disc. Recall the pieces that we need to cram onto a lens: metal microstructures to form antennas; compound semiconductors to make optoelectronic devices; advanced complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor silicon circuits for low-power control and RF telecommunication; microelectromechanical system (MEMS) transducers and resonators to tune the frequencies of the RF communication; and surface sensors that are reactive with the biochemical environment.

The semiconductor fabrication processes we’d typically use to make most of these components won’t work because they are both thermally and chemically incompatible with the flexible polymer substrate of the contact lens. To get around this problem, we independently fabricate most of the microcomponents on silicon-on-insulator wafers, and we fabricate the LEDs and some of the biosensors on other substrates. Each part has metal interconnects and is etched into a unique shape. The end yield is a collection of powder-fine parts that we then embed in the lens.

We start by preparing the substrate that will hold the microcomponents, a 100-µm-thick slice of polyethylene terephthalate. The substrate has photolithographically defined metal interconnect lines and binding sites. These binding sites are tiny wells, about 10 µm deep, where electrical connections will be made between components and the template. At the bottom of each well is a minuscule pool of a low-melting-point alloy that will later join together two interconnects in what amounts to micrometer-scale soldering.

We then submerge the plastic lens substrate in a liquid medium and flow the collection of microcomponents over it. The binding sites are cut to match the geometries of the individual parts so that a triangular component finds a triangular well, a circular part falls into a circular well, and so on. When a piece falls into its complementary well, a small metal pad on the surface of the component comes in contact with the alloy at the bottom of the well, causing a capillary force that lodges the component in place. After all the parts have found their slots, we drop the temperature to solidify the alloy. This step locks in the mechanical and electrical contact between the components, the interconnects, and the substrate.

The next step is to ensure that all the potentially harmful components that we’ve just assembled are completely safe and comfortable to wear. The lenses we’ve been developing resemble existing gas-permeable contacts with small patches of a slightly less breathable material that wraps around the electronic components. We’ve been encapsulating the functional parts with poly(methyl methacrylate), the polymer used to make earlier generations of contact lenses. Then there’s the question of the interaction of heat and light with the eye. Not only must the system’s power consumption be very low for the sake of the energy budget, it must also avoid generating enough heat to damage the eye, so the temperature must remain below 45 °C. We have yet to investigate this concern fully, but our preliminary analyses suggest that heat shouldn’t be a big problem.

Photos: University of Washington

In Focus:

One lens prototype [left] has several interconnects, single-crystal silicon components, and compound-semiconductor components embedded within. Another sample lens [right] contains a radio chip, an antenna, and a red LED.

All the basic technologies needed to build functional contact lenses are in place. We’ve tested our first few prototypes on animals, proving that the platform can be safe. What we need to do now is show all the subsystems working together, shrink some of the components even more, and extend the RF power harvesting to higher efficiencies and to distances greater than the few centimeters we have now. We also need to build a companion device that would do all the necessary computing or image processing to truly prove that the system can form images on demand. We’re starting with a simple product, a contact lens with a single light source, and we aim to work up to more sophisticated lenses that can superimpose computer-generated high-resolution color graphics on a user’s real field of vision.

The true promise of this research is not just the actual system we end up making, whether it’s a display, a biosensor, or both. We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions. As far as we’re concerned, the possibilities extend as far as the eye can see, and beyond.

The author would like to thank his past and present students and collaborators, especially Brian Otis, Desney Tan, and Tueng Shen, for their contributions to this research.

Over the last few decades, conventional contact lenses have been used to correct vision. Advances in manufacturing have changed the lens material: first from glass to the polymers used in gas-permeable contacts, and then to the current highly engineered hydrogels used in soft contact lenses. Recent advances in nano and microfabrication—enabling the construction of exceedingly small electronic, photonic, and sensing devices—promise to transition contact lenses to the next level of sophistication by turning them into functional microsystems. In particular, the promise of integrating display or sensing components onto a contact lens will offer a venue for the construction of novel devices.

For example, consider the construction of a contact lens that incorporates a see-through display that is both remotely powered and controlled via a wireless link. The display resolution may be as low as a single pixel or as high as is technologically feasible: low-resolution displays may find applications in gaming or aiding the deaf to receive information in an expedient fashion, whereas those with high-resolution may find application as substitutes for mobile phone or PDA displays. An intriguing application is augmented reality, in which a computer-generated image is super-imposed onto the that from the outside world. This may find applications in gaming, training, and manufacturing.

 

Figure 1. A University of Washington researcher holds a contact with embedded metal interconnects.

It is also interesting to note that live cells cover the surface of the eye. These cells are in indirect contact with blood serum, and thus many biomarkers of interest that are found in the blood may also be detected in tear films: close correlation between blood-serum tear-film levels has already been established for many molecules including glucose. A contact lens that incorporates a set of biosensors and can continuously monitor the biochemical environment of the surface of the eye will provide an invaluable tool for monitoring a person’s health status. This monitoring can be conducted in a completely non-invasive fashion and will allow access to a data collection ability that has been unavailable to the medical community.

The functional contact lens, incorporating a display or a set of miniature biosensors, is a multifunctional microsystem that requires the integration of a number of functions and components. Various units including power harvesting, antenna, wireless data transmitter/receiver, display control circuit, optoelectronic display pixels, biosensors, and sensor read-out circuits must be integrated onto a flexible transparent thin plastic substrate to form the complete system. Although the microelectronics industry is capable of producing each of the above sub-systems, it is significantly less capable of integrating them to form a functional system.

During the past few years, our group has developed a set of micro-manufacturing processes, based on self-assembly, that enable the integration and construction of a complex multifunctional microsystem on an unconventional platform such as the contact lens discussed here. Self-assembly is an omnipresent process in nature that contributes to the construction of complicated structures, devices, and systems across the size scale in the biological domain. In a self-assembly process, unlike a manual or a robotic one that may take advantage of top-down supervision, various parts of the system spontaneously find the right location and bind to complete the structure.¹ We have been developing processes to make micron-scale components such as silicon transistors,² light emitting diodes (LEDs), and detectors³ that can be mass-produced and induced to participate in a self-assembly procedure. Using the self-assembly process, we have been able to demonstrate that single crystal silicon circuits and compound semiconductor optoelectronic devices such as LEDs can be integrated onto thin flexible plastics and properly operated.

Self-assembly is a key technology necessary to construct the contact lenses discussed above. Recently, we have been able to show another key technology necessary to build a functional contact lens. In this work,⁴ we demonstrated how micron-scale metal interconnects can be incorporated onto a thin flexible plastic substrate (see Figure 1), how the structure can be encapsulated in a biocompatible polymer, and how the encapsulated structure can be micro-molded and polished into the shape of a contact lens. We have tested these lenses for up to 20 minutes on live rabbits and have not observed any adverse effects.

In summary, many of the key technologies necessary to build functional contact lenses have been already demonstrated. Specifically, our group has been able to show that micron-scale functional devices (electronics, optoelectronics) can be made in incompatible microfabrication processes and subsequently integrated onto plastics with self-assembly. All the metal structures necessary for building an interconnected system have already been constructed on a contact lens and tested for safety. We have also demonstrated the construction of a number of micron-scale bio-sensors that can directly convert the presence of a bio-marker to an electronic signal. The next challenge will be to integrate all the above functions and yield the first fully functional and stand-alone wireless contact lens. The day that such a device can be demonstrated may be much nearer than was imagined even a short while ago.

After a hard two weeks working at A&W, I was eager to return to computer studies. We started off doing a presentation on PCs vs Macs, which was much better than the one giving by the other group. The day after two students representatives from SFU told us all about the benifits of working with computers on fields such as programing , robotics, gaming and more. I was quite surprised the quality of education they offered and equally surprised when they said you can earn another degree by studying in one of China’s top universites. They also did sort of a mythbusters thing, where they debunked some of the rumors reguarding computer programing. I was quite impressed and this would definatly consider doing this as a possible future career. Yesterday night I also did quite a bit of reading reguarding computer ethics and how it sometimes conflict with laws. It was quite an interesting read and really got me thinking.