Old, but interesting Press Release.................

[Chris Ryser]

Press Release

MIT STUDENT INVENTOR SEES CLEAR FUTURE IN ëDESKTOP PRINTERí FOR LOW-COST EYEGLASS LENSES

Saul Griffith Awarded $30,000 Lemelson-MIT
Student Prize for Inventiveness

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (February 19, 2004)—Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate Saul Griffith, whose inventions include a ìdesktop printerî for low-cost eyeglass lenses, received the prestigious $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize ........................


Low-Cost Eyewear
Griffith’s advances in low-cost lenses sprung from his interests in rapid prototyping technologies and efficient manufacturing. Using a process dubbed programmable molding, he created a portable device similar to a desktop printer that can produce any prescription lens from a single-mold surface in five to 10 minutes.
The device casts the lenses by applying pressure and constraints to a programmable membrane, which becomes the mold surface when under pressure. The current device uses car window tinting film for the membrane and a reservoir of baby oil for applying the correct pressure. A large range of lens types, covering the majority of prescriptions, can be cast from two such mold surfaces.
Traditional lens manufacturing systems require expensive molds for each lens type. In remote rural areas, it is cost-prohibitive to maintain a library of thousands of lenses for relatively small populations of people. The traditional process not only comes with enormous inventory and handling costs, but also can result in excessive waste. Griffithís patent-pending device essentially eliminates these problems.
But efficient lens manufacturing is only half the issue. Proper diagnosis of vision problems is the other half. Current automatic diagnostic technologies are expensive, fragile and error-prone. Because they rely on a patient looking at electronically generated images a few inches away from his or her face, they can lead to incorrect diagnoses. Plus, highly skilled people are required to operate these machines.
To resolve this problem, Griffith has created a prototype device to test the human eye. Patients need only wear the device, which looks like an oversized pair of goggles, and look at the world around them. An electronic sensor superimposed on the goggles monitors the lens in the wearerís eye and adjusts the deviceís lens to cancel the refractive errors, thus determining the correct prescription. In 2001, Griffith and colleague Neil Houghton won the Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Business Plan Contest for the concept. They have since started a company called Low Cost Eyeglasses (www.lowcosteyeglasses.net ) to manufacture and market the product.

The whole story at: http://web.mit.edu/invent/n-pressrel...ress-04SP.html

I am wondering that now, as 3 years have passed, anybody has heard about this new concept, and if it is on the market.

[Leo Hadley Jr]

No News in the news section on their website since 2002

[impact500]

The goal is important but the task is not easy. Neil Houghton worked on the project for many years. Jim Morrison is another who put forth great effort for many years with limited results.

The efforts by Joshua Silver in the UK may be the current most active effort but I'm not certain.

A key fact is that the need is so large that humanitarian efforts will be inadequate albeit important. A solid low cost and profitable business effort is required. The challenges are large and often surprising as Neil, Jim and Joshua, I suspect would each agree.

Duly noted that I have not discussed with Neil Houghton or Jim Morrison in a good while but I think their efforts are not dead but perhaps "suspended" is the right word.

Mike Schaus

[gemstone]

I think I saw this guy speak at one of the OLA sessions. He had a pair of glasses that he put on and pumped up the lenses until he had good vision. (obviously a lot of problems to be resolved here). He said they could be manufactured for a $1 a pair. The biggest thing I took from his lecture was the billions of third world people that will NEVER have access to eyecare. My hats off to you Dr and Opticians that do the missions. It is the most noble thing you can do. :cheers:

[Chris Ryser]

Jim Morrison is another who put forth great effort for many years with limited results.

Is that Jim Morrison of Sarasota FL ??

[rinselberg]

Saul Griffith is an MIT alumnus with multiple degrees in Materials Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and has recently completed his PhD. He is the co-founder of Low Cost Eyeglasses, a company using two novel technologies he developed to provide prescription eyecare at low cost for rural and developing communities. He was awarded the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, Collegiate Inventors award for a membrane based molding system that can produce an arbitrary range of lenses from a single pair of flexible molding surfaces. He has received numerous other awards in design and engineering. A large focus of his research is in minimum and constrained energy surfaces for novel manufacturing techniques. Saul holds multiple patents and patents pending in textiles, optics, & nanotechnology.

http://www.squid-labs.com/people/saul.html


Saul Griffith and Low Cost Eyeglasses were the focus of some recent posts on OptiBoard; see Optiboard World Vision Project, posts 29, 30 and 31.

There is another website Adaptive Eyecare Ltd. about a different "low cost" corrective lens technology, but I don't know that this invention has had any real world impact:

The approach of Adaptive Eyecare has been to develop a completely new ophthalmic lens technology which permits us to manufacture revolutionary new spectacles which are universal, in the sense that one pair may be used to correct the vision of over 90% of people requiring correction. The special feature is that the wearer can adjust the power of each lens to his or her own requirements - this is particularly useful for developing world populations in areas which do not have adequate numbers of those specially trained personnel normally associated with the provision of vision correction.

The lenses in Adaptive Eyecare's spectacles operate in a manner which is somewhat similar in its optical function to the crystalline lens in the human eye - our lenses have the feature that the curvature of the lens surfaces is under the control of the wearer of the spectacles, and a simple manual adjustment is all that is needed to vary the power of each lens. In use, the wearer adjusts each lens so as to get clearest vision. This process takes less than a minute for both eyes. Having found the best setting, the lenses are then set, and the ancillary device used for lens adjustment is removed and discarded.

Adaptive Eyecare's adaptive lenses are fluid-filled and the power is changed by varying the amount of fluid in the lens. The power range of our lenses is +6 to -6 Dioptres, and the optical quality is similar to that of the typical human eye.