Do you have a source or something? I'm not trying to doubt you but I'm interested in learning further. I work on cameras with IR emitter and there are many safety protocols, emitter covers, warning signs, etc. for a simple IR camera that we are instructed to abide by.
I work with a company that makes high-power IR illuminators and we just went through certification testing with some units that are roughly 100x the output power of this example and they did not pose an eye hazard.
There is a bunch of stuff online about exposure to IR-A wavelengths, which covers the common IR LED/illuminator wavelengths. You certainly CAN build something which can cause various kinds of eye damage, but it is going to be a unit that you can literally feel the heat off of. For practical purposes, you couldn't make a wearable battery powered device that would be likely to cause eye damage without the entire thing being very large and unwieldy, assuming of course you are using standard incoherent (eg:non-laser) source.
