3D-Printed, Customizable "E-Glasses" Can Monitor Your Brain and Eyes While Protecting Your Vision

A 3D-printed frame packs as many sensors and features as possible, from eye tracking to control games to UV-responsive lenses.

These multifunction "E-glasses" are a Swiss Army Knife for your head. (📷: Adapted from ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2020)

A team of engineers and scientists at the KU-KIST Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology, the Korea Institute of Carbon Convergence Technology, the University of Seoul, Korea University, Pennsylvania State University, and SK Hynix have unveiled 3D-printed "E-glasses" which can monitor the wearer's brainwaves, act as a human-machine interface device for games through eye tracking, and turn into sunglasses on exposure to ultraviolet light — all at the same time.

"Personal accessories such as glasses and watches that we usually carry in our daily life can yield useful information from the human body, yet most of them are limited to exercise-related parameters or simple heart rates," the multidisciplinary team claims. "Since these restricted characteristics might arise from interfaces between the body and items as one of the main reasons, an interface design considering such a factor can provide us with biologically meaningful data."

"Here, we describe three-dimensional-printed, personalized, multifunctional electronic eyeglasses (E-glasses), not only to monitor various biological phenomena but also to propose a strategy to coordinate the recorded data for active commands and game operations for human–machine interaction (HMI) applications."

"Soft, highly conductive composite electrodes embedded in the E-glasses enable us to achieve reliable, continuous recordings of physiological activities," the team continues. "UV-responsive, colour-tunable lenses using an electrochromic ionic gel offer the functionality of both eyeglass and sunglass modes, and accelerometers provide the capability of tracking precise human postures and behaviors."

The prototype glasses are built into a 3D-printed frame with flexible electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors near the ears and electrooculogram (EOG) sensors near the eyes — data from which, they claim, can help diagnose conditions ranging from epilepsy to sleep disorders. Additional sensors provide motion tracking and ultraviolet light detection, for posture and gait monitoring as well as being able to adjust the lenses from clear indoors to dark sunglass tint in bright sunlight.

To prove the concept, the researchers used the prototype for a variety of tasks: Brain monitoring, health monitoring, UV detection and eye protection, posture detection, gait monitoring, and fall detection — and, finally, as a human-machine interface between the wearer and a game of Tetris in which the blocks are controlled by moving your eyes.

The team's work has been published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces under closed-access terms.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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