Blood Sugar Monitor
Smart Contact
Lens monitors Blood Sugar
Even contact lenses are getting smart. Aiming to help people
who are struggling with managing diabetes, a contact lens is
being developed to measure glucose levels in tears.
It uses a very small wireless chip and a miniaturized sensor
that can detect glucose.
The chip and sensor are embedded between two layers of soft contact
lens material. Brian Otis and Babak Parviz, both from Google,
are the people behind the project.
They wrote: "We're testing prototypes that can generate
a reading once per second. We're also investigating the potential
for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we're
exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to
indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain
thresholds. It's still early days for this technology, but we've
completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping
to refine our prototype."
They are currently in discussions with the FDA, but admit there's
plenty more work to do to make the technology mainstream. They
are planning to look for partners to help bring it to market.
January
2014
