These Prototype Contact Lenses Could Allow Colour-Blind People to Tell Green From Red



We may not be as lucky as birds, but the human eye does pretty well when it comes to colour perception; typically, we can distinguish around 1 million colours. A new type of contact lens could now restore some of that range in people with colour blindness, whose colour perception is limited in some parts of the spectrum.To get more news about Green Contacts, you can visit beauon.com official website.
Fixes for some types of colour blindness are already commercially available, in the form of clever frequency-filtering sunglasses. Now, engineers Sharon Karepov and Tal Ellenbogen from Tel Aviv University in Israel have come up with a way to transfer colour-correcting films onto the surface of contact lenses.

Not only does this innovation add exciting new options to the market of colour blindness therapy, the process can be custom-tailored to suit a range of visual impairments.To get more news about Purple Contacts, you can visit beauon.com official website.

What we commonly refer to as colour blindness actually refers to a variety of conditions that affect how our eyes and visual system identify different wavelengths of light; the vast majority of colour blind people do see colours, just not all of them.

At the back of a typical eyeball, a screen of three types of light-sensitive cone cells absorbs light waves and responds with a message to the brain.To get more news about Purple Contacts, you can visit beauon.com official website.

Some of these cells respond most excitedly to relatively short wavelengths (so they're labelled S for 'short'), while two respond to longer ones: one most sensitive to light that's around the green-to-yellow part of the spectrum (M), and another yellow-to-red (L).
When things go wrong with one or more of these cone cell types, it can result in various types of colour vision deficiency. Most commonly, people have trouble telling apart colours in the red and green wavelengths - which means the problems arise from the M or the L cones.

For example, in the most common type of colour blindness - deuteranomaly - signals from the 'green-yellow sensitive' (M) cells are dulled. As a result, the brain is overwhelmed with responses from the 'yellow-red sensitive' (L) cells. (You can play around with this colour blindness simulator to see what people with different types of deficiency may be experiencing.)Problems with distinguishing red from green interrupt simple daily routines such as deciding whether a banana is ripe," says Karepov, explaining the ingenious tech behind the new colour-correcting contacts.

The idea itself has old roots. More than a century ago, James Clerk Maxwell – the 19th century Scotsman famed for developing equations for describing the electromagnetic waves we call light – suggested filtering some colours could help the less vibrant ones shine through.

Several years ago materials scientist Don McPherson accidentally worked out that the right mix of rare earth metals embedded in a transparent material could scatter waves in a way that achieves the right level of light filtering.

The result, after a lot of tinkering, was a successful company called EnChroma, which produces glasses for people with 'red-green' colourblindness, which includes conditions such as deuteranomaly.