Transcript

Nanotechnology: Babak Parviz at TEDxUChicago 2012

good morning back in late uh 2003 I was a new assistant professor very nervous uh beginning uh beginning an academic career and my routine was to try to wake up as early as possible in the morning uh and put as many hours as possible into my research group and think get things off the ground the team of what we were working on back then was to miniature devices so we wanted to make really small electronics we wanted to make really small sensors and the other thing that we were talk uh thinking about and talking about was how to integrate these small devices onto unconventional places how would I put them into paper or how would I uh make glass functional so imagine this nervous uh new assistant professor waking up every morning uh to the tune of NPR so 5:00 a.m. or 6:00 a.m. blindly trying to find his way towards uh his box of contact lenses put the contact lenses on and start the day so I had this always in my mind of how to make small things how to put these small things into new places and every morning I was staring at this piece of plastic at the tip of my tip of my finger uh it was natural that after a while I put the two together and wondered what happens if we put these tiny devices on a contact lens what would that enable and that got us started in a pretty interesting Journey that took took some time of of exploring what happens if you turn your contact lenses to a platform so what uh our research group does at the University of Washington is to look at uh two possibilities for turning contact lenses into systems one is for uh using them for wireless sensing and the other one is for information display i' would like to take the next few minutes tell you what these applications are and the last part of my presentation would be a progress support of what is it that uh we've done to at least try to make these these things real now let's talk about Wireless sensing for for a second and this takes me to a doctor's office so what happens when we feel discomfort when we feel um ill we walk to doctor's office uh and the physician would look at us and the first things that they would do is perhaps to look at our face if looks okay or not color uh they may take our pulse they may take our temperature so they would do some physical parameter measurement but that takes us only so far the next thing that would do is to uh probably prescribe uh blood test so they want to know what happens in the chemistry of the body if the analyz are okay if there's there's an infection uh present so we know that the way our medicine works is uh not just based on physical parameters we need to monitor the chemistry of the of the body somehow but you notice actually there's a problem here and that is we don't do this very often actually for many of us we may go years after years without testing what happens in our in our body at all we need tools if you really want to understand uh how our bodies work and improve uh improve medicine we need tools that would allow us to monitor the body continuously and take many snapshots of what happens inside now these tools uh could be either outside of the body but we know the limitations of those tools that they don't have a chemical interface with the body or they could inside there could be implants and there are many examples of successful implants but uh unfortunately body always reacts to these implants and is very difficult to maintain a chemical interface so as of today we don't really have a tool that would allow any of us here to monitor continuously and non-invasively what happens inside our body if we can enable that tool I think we have access to new type of medical information and hopefully based on that we can improve improve medicine so we want to make this tool and we looked at the surface of the eye and it's astonishing actually what happens on this surface so it's not inside the body is not outside of the body is on the surface of the body and it turns out that many things that show up in our bloodstreams also show up uh in the tier fluid so they're present on the surface of the eye now for the most part we don't know what those correlations are so we know glucose for example present is present on the surface of the eye we know glucose is present uh in the blood and we know that we need to monitor that if uh someone has diabetes but what the correlations exactly are we don't uh we don't know for the most for the most part for most of these parameters but this is uh a very very promising interface uh for monitoring the body if I could make a contact lens and many of You In This Crowd probably wear contact lenses 125 million people actually wear them on a daily basis and they have been wearing them for decades if you could make a contact lens that you could wear similar to a normal contact lens and this lens would monitor the surface of the eye um do perhaps a basic chemical analysis and radio out the results you might have a tool that would allow us access to fundamentally new types of uh information um medical information and our hope is to build these tools and use this information to expand medical knowledge and perhaps this expanded medical knowledge someday can result in new therapies there are known conditions such as diabetes that we know that we have to continuously monitor the glucose level and our hope is to uh to expand this body of knowledge so these could be very very interesting tools for healthcare another area that uh uh makes us really excited about uh contact lenses is putting displays on contact lenses and this is about a contact lens again that you can wear similar to normal contact lens with the added benefit that it has a display of sorts so you could wear it around and this display has a wireless link perhaps to your cell phone and the cell phone talks to the cell phone tower so you have data connectivity and the contact lens can show you images various types of information and we can talk talk later on of what these types of information could be depending on the sophistication of this display you may use it for very basic things or gaming or get getting alerts or someday if you can make this very sophisticated and this is far into the future actually you may enable augmented reality so what is what is augmented reality augmented reality is a field that's quite active right now in computer science and it's about uh putting an extra layer of digital information onto what you would normally see so imagine you walking uh in the Oldtown in Leon this a picture actually um I took a few few years ago and you you're wearing a device could be in the form of a contact lens that could sense actually what you're seeing at and at the same time process data and put some extra information on this so we're not entirely actually altering what you see but we partially alter what you see to give you extra information about your environment or just tweak it uh and um uh give you a new sense of uh what your environment might might be so something like this is very very complicated to make and we're not nowhere near actually implementing these on contact lenses but the promise uh is there and the last thing I wanted to say about the applications of the display is that but if we think about how we use displays today so throughout the day we may use displays in a car dashboard we may use displays as Billboards we may use a smartphone display we may use a laptop we may use a desktop computer we may use TVs there's lots of displays that we interact with but if you take a step back and see what those displays do basically what they do is that they put an image on your retina so fundamentally we don't need all these displays all we need is a device to put an image on a retina and perhaps this could be implemented in the form of a contact lens so you can have just one Universal Display that you wear so that's your display that's your contact lens or glass or whatever format it takes and we can get rid of all the other displays that we use today and that really will significantly uh shrink the size of electronics and mobile devices now these are pretty interesting interesting areas the healthcare applications and the display applications of contact lenses but is any of this possible is it real and if you list actually all you need to do to enable these sophisticated systems unfortunately this list uh appears to be pretty daunting the technology development appears to be pretty daunting we need to make antennas radios extremely miniaturized systems extremely low Power Systems integrate all these uh onto a contact lens make sure they operate wirelessly make sure it's safe make sure they create images very very difficult so I want to take the next next few minutes and give you a progress report of uh what is it that we have done in our research group to at least move towards these goals and uh the disclaimer is that we have not really been able to completely uh solve these problems but at least we've made some good progress now let's look at look at the parts that we need and the techniques that we need to build these contact lenses we need extremely small circuits for example we need extremely small radios that would fit on a contact lens and turns out the progress of the semiconductor industry in the past few decades has really enabled us to make uh circuitry that's extremely small so what you see on this uh screen is an actual radio made in our group that um is actually comparable to the cross-section of the human hair and this has lots of transistors and it's a nice functional radio so as a state-of-the-art today in the semiconductor industry enables us to make electronic circuits radios that are extremely tiny related to that the recent progress in nanot technology past perhaps 10 years has enabled the construction of sensors uh things that can look at the molecule for example and Report electronically what they've seen has enabled the construction of sensors that extremely small so this graph is almost to scale and today we can make sensors that are smaller than a single cell even fit inside a single cell so we can make these very very tiny components that can interact with nature report back what they see uh so in our group we've developed basically techniques for making these small devices and here's another example of a photo detector collection um what you see uh on the upper left uh left corner of the slide is a solution uh that appears to uh contain maybe some powder or pepper but it really isn't a chemical actually if you put this under microscope these are individual photo detectors so that they can detect light and create an electronic signal that have specific shapes specific geometries and specific connections so we can actually make these tiny tiny components and related to that actually we have over the years developed techniques to place these components in the right place so here you see an example this is based on self assembly so we don't put these components one by one by a robot that we just program them to go to the right location over the years through self assembly we've developed techniques that would allow us to put these tiny components onto flexible plastic and other substrates so now having the components and having these techniques would allow us to make very interesting contact lenses here are a couple couple of examples these are just mockups actually that these particular contact lenses don't don't do much they just have electrical connections for circuits but you can see that the ability the access to technology can allow us to create very interesting systems so very quick actually what is it that we have accomplished in the in the medical uh part uh this is still work in progress but what you see here is an example of a contact lens which has a glucose sensor it has antenna and has a small radio so what this does is that we can power this up by sending radio waves it would act would wake up it would activate it would measure the glucose in the environment and it would radio out the results uh back to the through the transmitter so this is what we can do today this is just actually got accepted publication uh this works in a beare on a lab bench uh we don't know how this device is going to work work on an animal but this is experiment in progress so one thing I wanted to uh one point I wanted to make about these devices is that this looks like a very busy slide I apologize but there's one point about these systems and that is the progress of the semiconductor industry has enabled us to operate these systems with minuscule amounts of power so this whole system works with uh three microwatts and these Powers were considered noise essentially a few years ago so we just neglect this but now that we can make systems that require exceedingly small power levels to operate we can tap into sources of energy in the environment in the nature that previously we dismissed as noise in this case the system is completely out of powered so we just send radio wave in power the system and the system communicates with the radio uh back to us related to that actually we have Incorporated solar cells on contact lenses so you could actually walk around and collect the light from the environment just the light on the stage is is plenty and we can turn that light to usable power for our sensors radios and electronics it's an actual contact lens with solar cells uh collecting uh ambient Ambient Energy so this is what we can do today uh real quick about displays so we made some progress in the medical domain far from being done but I think uh the progress at least is is promising for displays um one of the questions the first questions that come to mind is whether you can focus on a on a display that's directly on the surface of your eyes so if you extend your hand U try to focus on your finger as you bring your finger closer and closer to your eyes you realize that your eyes cannot accommodate after a certain point so the image becomes blurry and whether you can create images directly on the surface of the eye uh has been an open question for some time because we've never had a display that was that close close to the eye and it actually turns out that you could do that but you need to incorporate more Optical elements into your display so it's not just a simple display anymore uh so we've started to incorporate lots of different types of micro Optics on the on contact lenses and this actually really excites me because historically when we go back these these spectacles were simple lenses these are very simple Optical components but with what we have in nanotechnology and microt Technology we can incorporate a lot more onto the surface of the eye and truly actually augment or alter and perhaps better people people's Vision so these types of lenses actually um help in creating an image um on the surface of the eye what you see in the lower right corner is a rabbit who's wearing a contact lens with lots of different tiny tiny lenses so we we do test on rabbits and so far everything that we' have tested has been completely safe so we've never harmed any animal uh we've done simulations of how the images might look like from a contact lens that has a display and allows people to look out uh so this is a computer simulation result this is not from a real contact lens but as you can see and this happens to be by the way this picture is taken in Michigan so it's right next door uh this where I went to school so very close affiliation to Midwest um as you can see it's possible to see the normal scenary but at the same time uh look at an image that's created by the contact lens here is the letter e shown in the image now in terms of practically implementing these displays we've taken very small steps uh forward let me uh quickly show you a small uh movie so what you see here is actually a contact lens from our lab and this contact lens has a small radio has antenna and has a very small light source let me see if I can play it one more time it may or may not play there you go uh so we can power this completely wirelessly from incoming radio waves and control that light source and turn it on and off uh so right now we can do two colors we can do blue or red and um fairly recently we've been able to uh turn on very simple text on contact lenses so we can um show this text on contact L still not completely in Focus we have a long way to go but we've Tak we've taken small steps uh forward uh to create a display that you can wear in the form of contact lenses so I hope that have uh I have uh convinced you that there's tremendous potential in turning contact lenses into into systems either for displays or for uh a medical application and I would like like to actually leave you with uh with one one message and this is in addition to be a big thank you to all of my collabor collaborators is the message that I would Hazard a guess that the era of uh solo star scientists is probably over if I look at what uh what we've done in our project many people with many types of different expertise are involved for pushing this forward from medical doctors to material scientists to Circuit designers uh to chemists and I think going forward many of the advances uh that we'll make in science and technology will be the result of uh groups of people working to together closely thank you very much