Project Information
The made4u project (pronounced: made for you) aims to achieve two main objectives. First, to improve a number of related technologies that are necessary to manufacture fully personalized spectacles, including lens geometry design, lens cutting and surface treatments (hard coating, anti-reflex, tinting), and frame design, manufacturing and finishing. Second, to define a sustainable business model in order to bring-to-market fully personalized spectacles, based on value chain flexible configurations that guarantee sustainable profits for each supply chain participant.
The project started in July 2008 and will complete in four years (June 2012). Indo International is the coordinator of the project and was also the company with the vision that created made4u as a candidate project for an FP7 funding grant. Less than five years earlier, in collaboration with IBV, Indo developed a lens design methodology for progressive lenses. The methodology focused on the personalized definition of lens geometry for rather complex (visual) impairment prescriptions, which was adapted to a particular patient's visual strategy. The visual strategy is measured by specialized made-to-purpose capturing equipment and was finally depicted by what Indo called the visual maps.
It became soon apparent that each person possesses a 'personal' visual strategy and, subsequently visual map, in the way he/she looks at objects. Thus, visual maps proved somehow similar to fingerprints. In other words, it is unlikely to find two individuals with exactly identical visual maps. The line of commercial products Indo has further created based on this design approach was called eyemade. Eyemade was also the basic technology that inspired the objectives of made4u to achieve creation of personalized spectacles, whereby personalization was extended to become global and cover not only lens geometry but also lens surface treatments and frame design and manufacturing.
The project has been deployed along nine Work Packages as follows:
WP1 - Business Modeling
WP2 - User Input Management
WP3 - Automatic Design
WP4 - Flexible Manufacturing Lenses
WP5 - Flexible Manufacturing Frames
WP6 - Integration and Operational Research
WP7 - The Demonstrator
WP8 - Dissemination and Exploitation
WP9 - Coordination and Project Management
WP1 and WP6 are mainly Research focused work packages, whereas WP7 will test a few recommended value chains, and WP8/WP9 are infrastructural Work Packages, as their name suggests.