Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/05/man-invents-robotic-device-to-insert-contact-lenses.html
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There are tools for contact lens wearers? The optometrist I visited in my teens never mentioned that. He just told his patients to practice. 
Still, my trust level isn’t high enough to let a robotic device touch my eyes. 
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I wear scleral lenses (for keratoconus), and I’m very grateful I don’t have dexterity issues. It would be supremely frustrating to try putting them in with unsteady hands. Hope this helps out people who need it!
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All kinds of nope.
We are just making it WAY too easy for the Terminators.
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Are there special kinds of contact lenses that achieve a result glasses can’t? I’d think if you had insertion issues the easy answer would just be glasses. Prior to eye surgery I always chose glasses unless doing an activity like snowboarding or climbing where glasses were a hinderance. I had pretty vanilla eye issues and my correction was way better with glasses. Getting the same clarity with contacts caused headaches.
I have the opposite experience. I wear my contacts at work for increased fidelity (tiny numbers/components), glasses for everything else.
(for reference, I’m at -13, surgery not an option because they won’t stop changing!)
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Just remember not to press the “turbo” button
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Yeah, those little suction-cup thingies. Useful when one has left one’s hard lenses in a little too long and they sort of stick to one’s eyeball.
When you’ve left in the lenses way too long, you can stick 'em on the lens - and they will stay there. Handy for freaking out your friends in the wind-down phase of a party.
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Yeah, keratoconus (mine, at least) can’t be corrected by glasses. I think there’s other conditions that glasses don’t work for, but I’m not an optometrist or ophthalmologist.
Scleral lenses are hard contacts made from a plastic material that can still let your corneas breathe (Rigid Gas Permeable or RGP). They only touch the white of your eyes (the sclera) in a ring around the edge. The rest curves over the cornea and is filled with saline.
Putting them in freaked me out when I first got them, as I’d never worn contacts before You get used to it though, and once they’re in they feel completely normal. Honestly it’s less comfortable now when they’re out. And they really stick in there, too. I almost can’t take mine out unless I have a suction cup like @FGD135 posted, and they’ve never fallen out by accident.
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Huh. Never saw one before. Oh, well. My eyes started rejecting contacts before I’d reached two years of using them. Gotta stick with glasses and avoiding eyestrain.
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I’ve lost hard lenses while riding my motorbike. Luckily only ever one at a time. Losing both might have been somewhat exciting in a bad way, what with being borderline Muldoni-Boys level myopic and all.
I’ve switched to soft lenses a long time ago, never any problems and better correction. At the moment I use lenses from two different manufactures for left eye/right eye respectively because that just works best for correcting the myopia and the CYLs.
Thing is, I have just become a member of “generation varifocals”, and varifocal contact lenses aren’t quite there yet, at least for my specific needs. So I’ll need (weakish) reading glasses when wearing lenses now…
Yeah, hard pass. While I can easily touch my eye (and I have no problem with my optometrist touching my eye), I will always have major trust issues with a robot getting anywhere near my eyeballs.
@orange, I wear contact lenses for distance and I have computer glasses and separate reading glasses. I keep hoping my pre-cataract condition will worsen so I can ditch one of these because my Rx changes each year and laser surgery isn’t an option for me either.
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Should be fine. After all, his previous inventions were very successful… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM77wkFOLoQ
And this is very mild for keratoconus. Contacts can correct for stronger prescriptions than glasses can, but the problem is putting a contact lens on top of a brittle football shaped cornea.
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