Tuesday, October 09, 2007
About 140,000 people each year in the US alone suffer damage to the nerve that controls blinking on one side of the face or the other. About 15% of these never recover the ability to blink, which is crucial for lubricating and cleaning the eye. Many suffer permanent eye damage as a result.
The traditional treatments for this problem are crude: implanting gold weights into the upper eyelid to help it close, connecting the eyelids to other nerves in the face, or even sewing the eyelids together in extreme cases.
But Doreen Jacob and colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh
, Pennsylvania, US, have devised a pair of glasses that communicate with sensors attached to the eyelids' muscles. The sensors report whether the muscles controlling the eyelid have contracted or not. If they haven't for a certain time, the glasses send a command to force a blink by stimulating the muscles electrically.
The team says that the device can prevent eye damage by ensuring that the build up of dirt and bacteria is prevented by regular blinking.
Read the full automatic blink