OPINION
By KELVIN DAVIS
(Kelvin Davis is the director or Greymouse, a cloud service-provider that supplies high quality, time-bound and cost-efficient services through its own facility in Fiji.)
Google is testing a smart contact lens designed to measure glucose levels in tears, to help people with diabetes as they try to keep their blood sugar levels under control.
The Google lab known for working on unusual projects like self-driving cars, is crafting a contact lens that could help diabetics manage blood sugar levels.
Pricking their fingers for blood testing is not only painful, it’s also disruptive for a diabetic.
This is why many check their blood glucose levels much lesser than they should; however, Google’s smart contact lens should be a change for the better.
http://tinyurl.com/kurzweilai-googles-allow-track
How does it work?
After having wondered if miniaturised electronics might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy, Brian Otis and Babak Parviz, the project’s co-founders at Google confirm that they are now testing:
- A smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturised glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material.
- They’re testing prototypes that can generate a reading once per second.
- The project is also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, by exploring the integration of tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds.
Hoping that its smart contact lens will more accurately measure glucose and help combat the type 2 diabetes epidemic, Google thought this project was worth a shot.
This was especially given the International Diabetes Federation is declaring that the world is ‘losing the battle’ against diabetes.
http://tinyurl.com/webpronews-google-lenses-now
Will it simplify lives?
Many people with diabetes tend to carry a lot of hardware on them and although the pump is a lot more convenient than an injection, it still requires you to re-puncture yourself about every three days:
- Many diabetic sufferers agree that despite the promise of the smart lenses being a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose with greater measurement accuracy, they don’t envision an immediate future where they’d give up the traditional glucose-monitoring method of drawing blood with a quick finger prick.
- Overall, diabetics are reacting positively to Google’s tiny technology and if nothing else, the smart contact lens could reduce the sheer number of gadgets a diabetes patient needs to lug around.
Unlike Google Glass, Google’s most famous wearable technology, the smart contact lens isn’t designed to make our lives infinitely more digitally connected.
It’s being designed to hopefully aid in removing the stigma that’s associated with having diabetes.
http://tinyurl.com/techhive-5-diabetics-googles
People who suffer from diabetes have to regularly monitor their glucose levels as they are unable to regulate their own blood sugar.
Diabetes is a chronic disorder caused by raised blood glucose levels. While it can be controlled, it cannot be cured.
While there may be a host of “smart” technological gadgets arriving in the foreseeable future, none of these devices have been aimed at users suffering from diabetes, which makes Google’s project unique.