Abstract
Presentation Description :
More than 100 million people in the United States of America alone suffer from age-related presbyopia caused by a loss of focal accommodation of the eye crystalline lens as the lens stiffens with age. The resulting accommodative error produces blurred images of objects placed at different distances. Conventional fixed uniform or graded power eyeglasses cannot provide accommodation thus resulting in significant visual impairment. This talks discusses the implementation of lightweight smart auto-focusing eyeglasses that augment the accommodative range thus partially or fully restoring normal vision function. The smart auto-focusing eyeglasses system consists of a pair of 30 mm aperture, piezoelectric tunable-focus eyepieces with accommodation amplitude of about 4D, a time-of-flight object distance range sensor, a microcontroller supervisory processing board with a wireless bluetooth low energy (BLE) module, a two-channel digitally controlled DC-to-DC converter providing the piezo actuator voltages, and a set of 3.7V rechargeable batteries, all integrated in a low-weight platform frame. The entire set weighs approximately 120 gr. The smart eyeglass system is controlled by a mobile phone application that is used to set the observer prescription, the type of refractive error and additional operaton parameters. In operation, the supervisory board continuously calculates the optical power correction vector required to produce sharp images of the object ahead by combining the prescription power vector, the object distance and the specific accommodative response of the defective eyes to reproduce the accommodation deficiency curves. The supervisory board then maps the required optical powers into eyepiece actuator voltages. The presentation discusses quantitative experimental results for laboratory imaging quality tests and reports laboratory results from one accommodation augmentation test for an example hyperopic presbyopia model measured utilizing a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. The laboratory tests indicate that the smart eyeglass system restores lost accommodation with high fidelity.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.