Google is testing a smart contact lens to find out what's in your tears

199IT News: While launching Glass, Google is also experimenting in the field of smart contact lenses. According to Brian Otis and Babak Parviz, co-founders of the Google smart contact lens project, Google is testing a smart contact lens that uses a micro wireless chip and micro blood glucose sensor embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material to detect blood glucose levels in tears. Here are the details:

You may have heard that diabetes is a growing problem that affects one in 19 people worldwide. But you may not be aware of the struggles many people with diabetes go through every day to keep their blood sugar levels in check. Uncontrolled blood sugar can put people at risk because it can cause a host of complications, some short-term and some long-term, including damage to the eyes, kidneys and heart. A friend of ours once told us that her mother had run her car off the road after passing out from hypoglycemia, which worried her.

Many people I've spoken to say that managing their diabetes is like a part-time job. Normal activities like exercising, eating, and even sweating can cause frequent changes in blood sugar levels. Sudden spikes and drops in blood sugar levels can be dangerous, and they occur frequently, requiring around-the-clock monitoring. Some people carry blood sugar monitors with sensors embedded under the skin. Most people prick their fingers multiple times a day to test their blood sugar levels. This practice is disruptive and painful. As a result, many people with diabetes don't check their blood sugar levels as often as they should.

For years, many scientists have studied bodily fluids—like tears—hoping to find an easier way for people to monitor their blood sugar. But as you can imagine, tears are difficult to collect and study. At Google[X], we thought that miniaturized electronics—think: chips and sensors so small they look like beams of light, with antennas thinner than a human hair—might be a way to probe the mystery of blood sugar in tears, perhaps enabling more accurate measurements of blood sugar levels.

We are currently testing a smart contact lens that uses a tiny wireless chip and a micro glucose sensor embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material to detect blood sugar levels in tears. We are testing a prototype that can read a blood sugar number every second. We are also studying its potential warning effect on the wearer, so we are trying to integrate micro LED lights into it that can light up when the wearer's blood sugar level exceeds or falls below a certain blood sugar value. This technology is still in the early stages, but we have completed several clinical studies that have helped to improve our prototype. We hope that smart contact lenses will one day become a new way for people with diabetes to control their blood sugar.

We are in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration, but there is still a lot of work to do to integrate this technology into a system that people can use. We will not do this alone: ​​we plan to find partners who are experts in bringing such products to market. These partners will use our technology to make smart contact lenses and develop applications that can provide measurement data to wearers and their doctors. We always say that we look for projects that seem worthy of thought or are a bit weird, and at a time when the International Diabetes Federation has declared that the world is "unable to defeat" diabetes, we think this one will be worth a try.