Blink® Frames Selected by One of the World's Most-cited Optometric Research Teams

By Globe Biomedical, Inc.

BIRMINGHAM, UK and RIVERSIDE, Calif., USA — September 24, 2026 — Globe Biomedical, Inc. today announced a research collaboration with the Aston School of Optometry at Aston University, one of the most influential optometry research groups in the world. The research at Aston is led by Dr Sayantan Biswas and Prof James Wolffsohn whose work focuses on myopia, ocular biometry and the effects of light exposure and near work on the eye. Their team is now using Blink® Frames to capture continuous ocular and environmental data from participants going about ordinary daily life — the first step in a collaboration built to scale into a longer-running cohort.

Eye care has never lacked measurement technology. It has lacked time. A patient sits in front of a clinician once a year, for a few minutes, and every decision made about that patient's eyes rests on that one narrow window. The 525,599 minutes in between — the hours at a screen, the minutes outdoors, the blinks taken and the blinks left incomplete — have been reconstructed from memory, estimated from questionnaires, or simply guessed at.

Every other field of medicine solved this a decade ago. Cardiology has continuous heart rate. Endocrinology has continuous glucose. Ophthalmology and optometry have a waiting room.

What Blink® Frames Measure

Blink® Frames look and wear like ordinary eyewear. Behind that, a sensor array captures the variables that actually drive ocular health outcomes, all day, with no action required from the wearer:

Light exposure and spectral composition, distinguishing genuine outdoor illuminance from indoor artificial light using dynamic, sun-angle-aware thresholds rather than a fixed lux cut-off — so outdoor time holds up across seasons and latitudes.
Near-work behaviour and working distance, classified continuously rather than recalled at a follow-up appointment.
Spectacle wear compliance, measured directly — the single variable that determines whether any prescribed intervention is actually working.
Blink rate and blink completeness, captured in high-rate bursts throughout the day, shipping in the current firmware release.
Eye-level temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, giving environmental context to every one of the above.

No other platform delivers this combination from a single ordinary-looking pair of glasses. It is not a wristband inferring eye behaviour from the arm, and it is not a clinic instrument measuring a moment. It is the eye's own environment, recorded where the eye actually lives.

A Partner Who Sets the Standards

Aston University's School of Optometry has shaped international practice across exactly the areas this platform addresses. The Blink® Frames research at Aston is being led by Dr Sayantan Biswas, Lecturer in Optometry, whose research focuses on myopia, ocular biometry and the influence of environmental and visual behaviours, including light exposure and near work, on the eye. The study forms part of his broader work investigating how real-world visual environments and behaviours influence ocular health and myopia.

It is supported by Professor James S. Wolffsohn, author of more than 400 peer-reviewed papers, Chief Scientific Officer of the International Myopia Institute, a past member of the executive of the Tear Film & Ocular Surface Society, co-lead of the DEWS reports that clinicians worldwide treat as the definitive reference on dry eye disease, and past president and academic Chair of the British Contact Lens Association.

The leading-edge team at Aston putting Blink® Frames through their paces is the strongest signal yet that continuous ocular monitoring has arrived as a serious research instrument.

Much of what we know about light exposure, near work and spectacle-wearing behaviour outside the clinic still relies on participants remembering and reporting what they have done. Being able to measure these behaviours objectively throughout everyday life could give us a much clearer picture of the visual environment people actually experience. Our first priority is to evaluate what Blink® Frames can measure reliably and how these data can be incorporated into rigorous vision research.

— Dr Sayantan Biswas, Lecturer in Optometry and lead investigator, Aston University

Aston asked the question every serious researcher asks first: what can this actually measure, and how well? That is the right question, and it is why we wanted to work with them. They are not looking for a gadget. They are looking for instrumentation they can build a decade of studies around — and we built Blink® Frames to be exactly that.

— Joshua Park, Chief Executive Officer, Globe Biomedical, Inc.

Why This Matters Now

Myopia is progressing through the global paediatric population at a rate that has been called an epidemic by every major body in the field, and the most effective behavioural intervention available — time outdoors — has never had a reliable way to be prescribed, monitored or verified. Ocular surface disease is increasingly understood as lifestyle-driven, which means it cannot be understood at all without lifestyle data. In both cases the science is ahead of the instrumentation, and the instrumentation is the constraint.

Globe Biomedical has deployed Blink® Frames with research and clinical partners across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. The collaboration with Aston is structured to expand from its current pilot phase into a longer-running cohort, generating the kind of longitudinal behavioural dataset that does not currently exist anywhere in eye care.

Built for Privacy from the First Line of Code

Blink® Frames capture no audio, and no images of the surrounding environment or of other people. The frames do not connect to any network while being worn. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, held under least-privilege access controls, and governed by defined retention and deletion procedures. Globe Biomedical operates the platform in compliance with GDPR and is a registered participant in the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. In research deployments, the company holds no identifying information about participants whatsoever.

About Globe Biomedical, Inc.

Founded in 2019 and based in Riverside, California, Globe Biomedical, Inc. was built on a straightforward observation: every other field of medicine learned to measure its patients continuously, and eye care did not. Cardiology, endocrinology and sleep medicine were all transformed by instruments that left the clinic. Ophthalmology and optometry are still working from the annual visit.

Blink® Frames, the company's flagship platform, is a wearable system comprising sensor-equipped spectacles, a secure cloud processing framework and a mobile application. It captures light exposure and spectral composition, near-work behaviour and working distance, wear compliance, blink dynamics and imagery of the wearer's ocular surface, supporting myopia management, ocular surface research, intraocular pressure monitoring and oculomics. Blink® Frames are in use with academic, clinical and commercial research partners across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.

Globe Biomedical is building the instrumentation layer that eye care has been missing — and the longitudinal datasets that only continuous measurement can produce. Learn more at globebiomedical.com and blinkframes.com.

About Aston University

For over 130 years, Aston University has been making our world a better place through education, research and innovation. Our history is intertwined with the remarkable city of Birmingham, once the heartland of the Industrial Revolution and now the thriving base for an innovation ecosystem of global significance, which Aston is co-creating.

Our vision is to be a leading university for science, technology and enterprise, measured by the positive transformational impact we achieve for our people, students, businesses and the communities we serve.

Aston focuses on high-quality, exploitable research that has an impact on society through medical breakthroughs, advancements in engineering, policy and practice in government, and the strategies and performance of business.

The University offers a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes, as well as continuing professional development opportunities.

Thanks to its focus on delivering excellent outcomes for students, Aston University's reputation for employability continues to grow. It is second in England for social mobility (2025 HEPI Social Mobility Index) and is top 20 for graduate salaries (2025 Longitudinal Education Outcomes).

Aston University is now defining its place in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (and beyond) within a rapidly changing world.

For media inquiries in relation to this release, contact Helen Tunnicliffe, Press and Communications Manager, on (+44) 7827 090240 or email: h.tunnicliffe@aston.ac.uk.

Media Contact

Globe Biomedical, Inc.

media@globebiomedical.com

Riverside, California, USA