Contact lens that brings internet connectivity into any object over WiFi

Can you imagine yourself browsing through social media or using the internet that comes indirectly through a contact Lens? Not that hard, right? If a piece of cloth can keep you cool without air conditioners then, you can definitely use the internet through the contact lens.

Shyam Gollakota, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, has created a contact lens which can connect to a smartphone or can bring Internet connectivity into just about any object, even disposable ones, over WiFi.

With an aim to improve medical devices, whether cheap sensors or more complex implants, the prototype - backscatter - build by Gollakota and his grad student demonstrates ways for devices without batteries to communicate and power themselves by recycling signals from WiFi devices or radio and TV stations.

Accordingly to Gollakota, “As you sit around in this room we have so many radio signals bombarding us,” he said at EmTech MIT 2016 event. “You can harvest power from these signals use reflections to create transmissions.”

Recent tests have shown that backscatter devices recycling the signals from a WiFi router can make connections over a range of up to a kilometer, or throughout a three-story house.

Backscatter technology makes it significantly cheaper to add connectivity to a device or object. Not only does it remove the cost of a battery, but the circuitry needed to communicate in this way is simpler and cheaper than conventional radio hardware.

“The goal is having billions of disposable devices start communicating,” Gollakota further said.

Gollakota has also cofounded a company, Jeeva Wireless, to commercialize their technology. The startup is in talks with a large pharmaceutical company about adding connectivity to a commonly used disposable medical product.