2 February 2026

A Chinese research team has developed the world’s first self-powered eye-track­ing sys­tem that gen­er­ates elec­tri­city from blink­ing, enabling eye ­con­trolled wheel­chairs for patients with amyotrophic lat­eral scler­osis (ALS), the Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy Daily repor­ted on Sunday.

The sys­tem was developed by a team led by Long Yunze, a pro­fessor at Qing­dao Uni­versity, in col­lab­or­a­tion with research part­ners.

The sys­tem over­comes the long-stand­ing power sup­ply bot­tle­neck of con­ven­tional eye ­track­ing devices.

Exist­ing mature products rely on external power sources, which has been a major bar­rier to prac­tical use. For patients attempt­ing to con­trol wheel­chairs with tra­di­tional eye-track­ing sys­tems, heavy head-moun­ted equip­ment, tangled power cables and fre­quent low-bat­tery alerts often erect a “high wall” between them and inde­pend­ent mobil­ity.

To address this chal­lenge, Long’s team pro­posed a new approach: let­ting the eyes gen­er­ate their own power. The self-powered eye-track­ing sys­tem adopts a dual-layer design com­bin­ing a con­tact lens and a pair of eye­glass frames. It is ultra-light­weight, feels no dif­fer­ent from wear­ing ordin­ary glasses, and draws all the energy it needs from eye move­ments, elim­in­at­ing bat­ter­ies and achiev­ing true energy self­ suf­fi­ciency.

Long said that the sys­tem effect­ively builds a “mini power plant” within the eye.

A layer of poly­di­methyl­silox­ane, attached to the eye­ball like a con­tact lens, func­tions as a micro tri­bo­elec­tric gen­er­ator, con­tinu­ously pro­du­cing elec­tric charges through fric­tion whenever the user blinks or moves their eyes, accord­ing to the report.

A pair of eye­glasses fit­ted with trans­par­ent indium tin oxide elec­trodes around the lenses serves as a “sig­nal trans­mit­ter.” Through elec­tro­static induc­tion, the elec­trodes pre­cisely cap­ture changes in charge dis­tri­bu­tion and con­vert them in real time into recog­niz­able elec­trical sig­nals, which are then relayed via con­trol cir­cuits to external devices, enabling accur­ate con­trol, per the report.

Source: Global Times