Dye sensitized photovoltaic miniaturized solar cells, used as optical sensors for line of sight detection

Dye sensitized photovoltaic devices have been studied as transparent and low-cost solar cells. Our group have miniaturized the cells and used them as transparent optical sensors. This paper reports the design and fabrication of the cells and avoids the cross talk among cells, which was found recently and such effect provokes hardware instability. We use these optical sensors as an eye tracking device. The sensor array detects the difference in the intensity of light reflected from the pupil and the sclera and then determines the pupil position. Each sensor consists of two electrodes and electrolyte; hence our device conformed by only four semi-circular shaped sensors on eyeglasses can detect the view angle in both horizontal and vertical directions. Manufacturing process gives us freedom to easily re-arrange, add or remove sensors. In our prior work we had good performance in stand-alone configuration. We used specialized equipment from National Instruments for our measurements. However we found that: A cell is not 100% independent from the others, is affected by the absence or presence of light at the neighbour cells. When our device is connected to other electronic devices (for data processing), all cells have the same voltage among them; therefore, all cells behave the same way when any of them is affected by light. The root cause is, due to all sensors were interconnected via a micro channel and filled with electrolyte, due to its conductive properties, electrolyte does neither need electrodes nor physical paths to conduct electricity, so it creates a liquid wire between sensors, hence the gap between them become inexistent, consequently when our device is connected to other electronic devices, due to this unique channel and by sharing a common electronic ground, this connection provokes the voltage to be the same among all sensors in the array. Our device becomes four separate voltage lines in a parallel circuit. The device was also in short circuit provoked by some overlapping paths, despite that such paths were in different layers and separated by an adhesive film of 100pm thickness, such thickness was not large enough to creates a successful dielectric to isolate the paths.