Here is good news for diabetes patients now they can keep
track with their sugar level without pricking their fingers and drawing blood
up to 10 times daily. Google brings another wearable aye device, Soft contact lens
that can detect glucose level in tears.
The latest project to come out the Google X lab is a smart
contact lens, the company unveiled in official blog post.
It is one of the few ways to make glucose monitoring for diabetic patients more
convenient and less invasive.
The lens uses a small glucose sensor and a wireless transmitter
to keep an eye on the blood sugar levels and adjust the dose of insulin
required help those among the world's 382 million diabetics who need insulin
keep a close watch on their blood sugar and adjust their dose.
Sandwiched in this lens are two twinkling glitter-specks
loaded with tens of thousands of miniaturized transistors. It's ringed with a
hair-thin antenna. Together these remarkable miniature electronics can monitor
glucose levels in tears of diabetics and then wirelessly transmit them to a
handheld device. Google is hoping to add tiny LED lights to it that could flash
if glucose levels aren't what they should be.
Google says prototype will take at least five years to reach
consumers. We can imagine about that time when this will equipped with mobile
apps and will be easier to keep track about health.
Google X project leader for the smart contact lens, Brain
Otis said that "We're testing a smart contact lens that we built that
measures the glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and a
miniaturised glucose sensor,"
During years of soldering hair-thin wires to miniaturize
electronics, Otis burned his fingertips so often that he can no longer feel the
tiny chips he made from scratch in Google's Silicon Valley headquarters, a
small price to pay for what he says is the smallest wireless glucose sensor
ever made.
"We've had to work really hard to develop tiny,
low-powered electronics that operate on low levels of energy and really small
glucose sensors," Mr Otis said at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters.
In fact, the contact lens isn’t the only device created in
attempt to facilitate the lives of millions of diabetics. A similar contact
lens by Netherlands-based NovioSense is a work in progress. Also, Israel-based
OrSense has already tested a thumb cuff. Finally, early designs for special
tattoos and saliva sensors have been presented.
One gadget, a wristwatch monitor, was approved by the FDA in
2001, but patients complained that low-level electric currents taking fluid
from their hands was a painful process, and the device demonstrated some errors
as well.
"It doesn't look like much, but it was a crazy amount
of work to get everything so very small," he said before the project was
unveiled Thursday. The embedded electronics in the lens do not obscure vision
because they lay outside the pupil and iris.
It took years of soldering hair-thin wires to miniaturise
electronics, essentially building tiny chips from scratch, to make what Google
said is the smallest wireless glucose sensor ever made.
The contact lenses were developed during the past 18 months
in the Google X lab that also came up with a driverless car. Research on the
contact lenses began several years earlier at the University of Washington,
where scientists worked under National Science Foundation funding. Until Thursday,
when Google shared the project, their work had been kept under wraps.
Currently, 382 million people have diabetes, and by 2035
that number will rise to 592 million, according to International Diabetes
Federation. Eighty percent of people with diabetes live in low- and
middle-income countries, and most of them are between 40 and 59 years old.
"We're still really early on. We're confident about how
the technology is going so far. But there's a huge amount of work left to
do," Mr Otis said.
