Innovative advancement of contact lenses for noninvasive diagnosis and therapy: A mini review

With the growth of the market and the number of wearers, contact lenses have been widely used for vision correction and cosmetic purposes for a few years. The current study opens up a new path for their applications. On the one hand, contact lenses are ideal sensing platforms due to advances in the monitoring of relevant indicators in tears such as glucose and intraocular pressure. Aside from detecting a single analyte at a time, multifunctional contact lens sensors were proposed to monitor two or more indicators at the same time. Contact lenses, on the other hand, are also suitable drug delivery platforms due to their good biocompatibility and long contact duration with the cornea. Different drug delivery approaches are being investigated to increase drug duration and bioavailability. In addition, the integration of these novel drug delivery methods into wearable sensors has become a topic for a complete closed-loop program for disease management. We began this review by summarizing the categories and properties of current contact lenses. Then, innovative applications of contact lenses such as biosensors and drug delivery systems were also summarized. In general, the current progress in the applications of contact lenses provides a new possibility for noninvasive diagnosis and therapy of ocular diseases.