Your first thought after hearing about Google’s new smart contact lenses may have been of Google’s other buzzed-about innovation, Google Glass. But if you were thinking that the two had anything in common, you’d be wrong.
On Thursday, Google announced plans to make contact lenses embedded with minuscule chips and sensors that will measure the glucose level in tears, allowing diabetics to painlessly keep track of their glucose levels. If the technology reaches the market, it could revolutionize the typically invasive blood sugar-monitoring routine.
The electronics affixed to the contact lenses are no bigger than specks of glitter. From Google.
Though still in the early stages of development, these contacts look and feel like soft contact lenses, and in addition to being noninvasive, they may also be more informative than meters currently on the market. The contacts are equipped with wireless chips and glucose sensors that measure blood sugar levels at a rate of once per second. The reading would then be sent to a device, such as a handheld monitor, using wireless RFID technology. Google is also working on adding LED lights to the high-tech lenses that would flash when blood sugar levels are too low or high.
Traditionally, people with diabetes must prick their fingers to draw blood, swab that blood onto test strips, and then feed those strips into an electronic reader multiple times a day to get a blood sugar reading. As a result, many diabetics check their glucose levels less often than they should. With these contacts, the wearer doesn’t need to drop everything to take a reading. Instead, they can do so discreetly, wearing a contact lens that contains an antenna thinner than a human hair.
Measuring blood glucose could be replaced by measuring the glucose in tears. From Alisha Vargas.
The project is being led by Brian Otis and Babak Parviz, who once led the Google Glass team. In a blog post announcing the project, they wrote: “We’ve always said that we’d seek out projects that seem a bit speculative or strange, and at a time when the International Diabetes Federation (PDF) is declaring that the world is ‘losing the battle’ against diabetes, we thought this project was worth a shot.”
Diabetes is one of the biggest health problems facing the country, affecting 382 million people worldwide and 25.8 million Americans—that’s more than 8 percent of the country.
As with any new technology, the talk surrounding these smart contact lenses isn’t all good: some worry that the sensitive health information of these millions of people could end up in the wrong hands. Fortunately, Google has also considered the potential security . Google officials assured Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, that the data would not be added to the company’s servers.
While that may not be enough to assuage the fears of the most serious skeptics, it’s important to remember that the Google contact lenses are not yet on the market. Otis and Parviz are currently in talks with the FDA and are actively looking for partners to develop apps that would make the glucose measurements available to the wearers and their doctors.
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