Healthcare Technology Featured Article

January 17, 2014

Eye-boggling: Google Contact Lens Research Project Seeks to Help Diabetics Patients


It should perhaps come as no surprise - especially given that Larry Page has made it clear many times that Google is greatly interested in developing technology, including wearable technology, that will help us all live better lives, by which he means in some cases, technology having pure medical benefits - that Google has a potentially very important project in the works to help diabetics patients.

The new project comes out of Google X Lab, and is focused on developing a contact lens that will be able to test for distinct markers related to diabetes. The company noted this is a recent blog post, which included the image shown below.

There is a great deal going on with contact lens technology. Another article we recently wrote provides a good deal of background on what is going on in this specialized area of contact lens wearable tech and is worth a follow-up read.

The Google technology uses a wireless chip and a tiny glucose sensor that is in turn embedded between two layers of contact lens material. The resulting lens is—theoretically—able to measure the glucose levels in tears. The prototypes Google is currently testing are able to generate a reading once per second. This is rather powerful—glucose levels change all the time and in today's world it typically requires a pin prick, a means to dab the blood and then a means to evaluate glucose levels by way of a meter. Clearly such a contact lens would be a significant step forward.

Assuming it works, the lens would obviously  help diabetics regulate their blood sugar levels more effectively—and far more easily—and avoid having to test their blood with those finger pricks throughout the day.

But as is to be expected, there is a great deal of work yet to do. The good news is that in December four Google executives met with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to a schedule that was posted online. In the blog post Google acknowledges these discussions and makes it clear "there's still a lot more work to do to turn this technology into a system that people can use."

One of the things that need to be overcome is in creating an efficient means for the lens to wirelessly communicate its findings back to a mobile app for the patient and/or to a cloud-based monitoring system that can also communicate with healthcare providers. Our earlier article details some of the ways this can be done. One method would be for the lens to use RF to communicate with a wearable tech device that would then use low energy Bluetooth to communicate with a mobile device such as a smartphone. The smartphone would run the app and would be able to use Wi-Fi to communicate up to the cloud.

All very cool tech that is really just around the corner. Stay tuned!




Edited by Ryan Sartor
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