Extreme Task-Specific Eyewear

Today, lenses can be tailored to nearly every challenge or pleasure

By Karlen McLean, ABOC, NCLC

There are countless detailed tasks to be done in this world, and today's lens technologies can be used creatively to solve specific visual challenges. Add lens material options and detailed measurements along with some in-office tinkering in some cases, and you've created eyewear that will answer every patient's visual needs.

STARTING OUT RIGHT

Lenses specifically designed for horseback riding, photography, cooking, parachuting, or virtually any specialized task are now possible due to free-form technology. Free-form or digital processing customizes lens surfaces resulting in lenses honed for specific needs.

Several manufacturers offer customized vision via free-form. For example, at least one manufacturer's free-form surfaced PAL and single vision lenses let ECPs specify focal length, allowing the lenses to be fully customized.

However, task-specific eyewear is about more than the lens design. Lens material and attributes, such as polarization, AR, photochromic levels, and lens color count as well.

■ Shopping and traveling. Photochromic and polarized photochromic lenses that adjust density using ambient light as well as UV light are noted for use not only when driving, but also for outdoor-to-indoor tasks, such as shopping.

■ Chemical exposure. Trivex lenses are high-impact protective and chemical-resistant. This is important in industrial settings, but also for home hazards such as painting, cleaning, and hobbies using chemicals.

■ Paintball. Paintball players take their sport seriously, but it's hard to play hard when your prescription eyewear slides down, gets displaced under the protective mask, and fogs up. Two solutions seem to work best: 1. Use contact lenses under the helmet instead of glasses; or, 2. Use prescription goggles or insertable adapters that fit snugly under masks with ventilation to prevent fogging.

■ Digital viewing. According to The Vision Council, nearly 90 percent of those who use a computer at least three hours a day exhibit symptoms associated with computerrelated eye strain, including dry eyes, headaches, blurry vision, and visual fatigue.

Lenses for digital device users feature digitally processed lens surfaces designed to ease visual fatigue and enhance vision when using computers and hand-held devices. Typical computer vision lenses include single vision intermediate focus and PALs with wider intermediate, combined with AR to cut reflections and sometimes a light, defining tint.

EXTREME CUSTOMIZATION

Task-specific eyewear demonstrates that nothing is impossible when it comes to ingenuity and creativity. Sports vision solutions aren't only about high-impact resistant frames and lenses.

"I made task-specific lenses for a man who participates in a sport where he has to ski and then shoot targets with a rifle without using a telescopic sight," says Chris Gregg, optician/owner of Inver Grove Heights Family Eye Clinic in Inver Heights, Minn. "I made the flat-top bifocal at an angle, set temporally, so that he could see the front sight through the bifocal and could see the target through the distance portion. I drew a line on the dummy lens set in the frame to help determine where he wanted the bifocal placement."

Special events can also call for task-specific lenses. "I dispensed a pair of frames designed like a tennis racket for each eye; a novelty frame that I had displayed in my front window," says Tom Hicks, ABOC, NCLC, and owner of Oxford Opticians in Oxford, Ohio. "A girl wanted them for her debutante ball at a tennis club. I had to groove the frame's eye wire using a tool to carefully cut the groove a little deeper than it was to hold the Rx lenses. I specified decentration to the lab. It all went off without a hitch."

Sandi Shannon, LDO, manager of the Veteran's Administration optical shop in Ocala, Fla., worked with a surgeon who was nearsighted but refused to wear a multifocal lens because he preferred uncorrected near vision for the type of surgery he performed. "We took a semirimless frame and custom-shaped the lens to give him a reverse half-eye," she says. "To use them, he looked under the lens to do surgery. It looked odd, but he loved them."

Shannon also recalls a pair of eyewear that her business made for Santa Claus. "For a man playing Santa Claus who needed to read kids' lists and see distance in one very tiny, round frame, we used a round 22 seg and filled up most of the frame with that, leaving him with very little, but a still usable, distance area while he wore them on the end of his nose." EB