Google zooms in on smart contact lens designed to help diabetics track their blood sugar levels in the blink of an eye

January 17, 2014 1:16 am

Google zooms in on smart lenses

By Richard Waters in San Francisco

Google is aiming to take a lead in an area of “wearable” health devices where Microsoft once hoped to be a pioneer, as it tests a contact lens designed to help diabetics track their blood sugar levels in the blink of an eye.The prototype device, revealed late on Thursday, analyses the glucose levels in a wearer’s tears. Google said it hoped the idea would one day save millions of diabetics from the need to take frequent blood samples to track their condition. However, it conceded: “There’s still a lot more work to do to turn this technology into a system that people can use.”

Microsoft said nearly three years ago that it was conducting research with the University of Washington into the same idea. The professor involved in that project, Babak Parviz, is now behind the Google lens project, and headed Glass, the “smart” glasses that Google has said will go on sale this year.

Google’s move into medical diagnostics follows an outbreak of interest in the technology world in health-related “wearables”, or devices designed to help improve fitness and health. So far, most of these have been designed to track sleep patterns or general health, for instance by counting the number of paces walked each day, rather than to analyse bodily fluids.

The Google prototype is made up of a small wireless chip and a glucose sensor embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material. The elements “look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair”, it said. The internet company added that it was exploring the idea of including tiny LED lightbulbs that would light up as a warning if a person’s glucose level moved outside a prescribed range.

Other companies have also sought to use contact lenses as a form of health monitor. Sensimed, a company in Switzerland, advertises lenses that monitor the shape of an eyeball to identify the risks of glaucoma.

Wristband devices are also quickly evolving, with new sensors being added to track the wearer’s biorhythms. Basis Science, a start-up in San Francisco, sells a $199 watch that tracks heart rate, monitors changes in sweat levels and logs body temperature.

Google has already made ambitious moves into wearable computing with Glass, and healthcare with a new venture called Calico, though the contact lens represents the first overlap between the two fields.

Talking last year about the potential in contact lenses, Mr Parviz said that the company believed it would eventually be able to put all the functionality of its Glass device into a soft lens.

Mr Parviz and Brian Otis, another researcher on the project, said in a blog post that one in 19 people suffer from diabetes, creating a huge need for easier monitoring tools. “Although some people wear glucose monitors with a glucose sensor embedded under their skin, all people with diabetes must still prick their finger and test drops of blood throughout the day,” they wrote.

Yes, Google Really Is Working On Smart Contact Lenses That Can Monitor Your Body’s Health

JULIE BORT

JAN. 16, 2014, 7:59 PM 3,688 3

The latest fantastical project to come out the Google X lab is a smart contact lens, the company said in a blog post on Thursday.

Word leaked last week that Google was talking to the FDA about a new project involving biosensors.

The lens is being developed specifically to help track blood glucose levels for diabetics, as an alternative to the painful pricking-of-the-finger that diabetics must endure today.

And yes, Google is talking to the FDA about these lenses.

The lens has “chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair.” Google is hoping to add tiny LED lights to it that could flash if glucose levels aren’t what they should be.

Should this lens ever make it market, we can imagine a time when they could include apps that do all sorts of things. They basically let you put a computer sensor directly into your eye.

The unit working on this, Google X, is the same one that brought us Google Glass, the self driving car, and Internet balloons.

Google Unveils Smart Contact Lens Project to Monitor Glucose

Google Inc. is diversifying into contacts lenses — smart ones.

The Mountain View, California-based company said in a blog post today that it’s testing an ocular device that’s designed to measure glucose levels in tears, as the company pursues long-term projects at its secretive X Lab research group. The lenses use a tiny wireless chip and glucose sensor to provide readings once per second, project co-founders Brian Otis and Babak Parviz wrote in the post.

Google is expanding beyond its core search-engine business by investing in new technologies that can lead to new business opportunities, including the Google Glass devices, driverless cars and high-altitude air balloons to provide wireless Internet access. The contact lenses could address the challenges of diabetes, including the process of getting readings from blood, the company said in the post.

“It’s still early days for this technology, but we’ve completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype,” Otis and Parviz wrote. “We’ve always said that we’d seek out projects that seem a bit speculative or strange.”

Bloomberg News reported last week that Otis and Google employees with connections to the X Lab had met with Food and Drug Administration officials who regulate eye devices and diagnostics for heart conditions.

Smart Lenses

Otis is on leave to Google from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he is an associate professor in the electrical engineering department, according to the university’s website. Otis has worked on biosensors and holds a patent that involves a wireless powered contact lens with a biosensor.

Parviz was involved in the Google Glass project and has talked about putting displays on contact lenses, including lenses that monitor wearers’ health.

In 2012, the two were among the co-authors in a paper titled “Glucose Sensor for Wireless Contact-Lens Tear Glucose Monitoring” for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

Google said in the post that it’s in discussions with the FDA and will need to do more work to make the lenses a viable product. The company said it plans to look for partners to bring devices like these to market.

Google is committed to making bets on research and development even if they don’t deliver significant profits and revenue, Chief Executive Officer Larry Page has said.

“Our main job is to figure out how to obviously invest more to achieve greater outcomes for the world, for the company,” Page said during a call with analysts last July. “And I think those opportunities are clearly there.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net;

Google’s smart contact lens: What it does and how it works

By Hayley Tsukayama, Published: January 17

Wearable devices are already making technology much more intimate than once seemed possible, but Google has kicked it up to a whole new level. The company has announced a project to make a smart contact lens. But this gadget isn’t going to be used to deliver your e-mail straight into your skull — at least not yet. The project is working to tackle one of the biggest health problems facing the country today: diabetes.

Given the public wariness about wearable devices and their capabilities for collecting data, allowing the company to get that close raises the question: How will Google handle this data? Or, for that matter, how can any company stepping into a new world of collecting sensitive medical data deal with the security concerns?

It’s a question that Google officials have clearly thought a lot about, said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who was briefed on the lens before the company’s Thursday announcement. Hall said that Google assured him that the data would not be added to the company’s banks of personal information gathered from other services.

“The data will never hit Google’s servers,” he said. “That’s a forward-thinking affirmative claim that they’re making. That is important.”

The soft contact lens that Google is unveiling — it’s still a prototype — houses a sensor that measures the glucose levels in tears. A tiny pinhole in the lens lets tear fluid seep over the glucose monitor to get regular readings. Right now, the company said, it can get a level reading once every second. The lens also features a tiny antenna, capacitor and controller so that the information gathered from the lens can move from the eye to a device — such as a handheld monitor — where that data can be read and analyzed. It will draw its power from that device and communicate with it using a wireless technology known as RFID.

Given the sensitive nature of the data, Hall said, Google has also said it will make sure any data transferred from the lens cannot be manipulated — something that could have potentially fatal consequences if patients inject the wrong amount of insulin. Google has also worked to build in safeguards against other kinds of problems, such as a piece that is similar to a circuit breaker to prevent the lens from overheating.

The National Diabetes Education Program estimates that 382 million people worldwide and 25.8 million Americans have diabetes. That means that every day — multiple times a day — more than 8 percent of people in this country must take time out to prick themselves to test their blood levels.

“It’s disruptive, and it’s painful,” Google project co-founders Brian Otis and Babak Parviz said in the blog post. “And, as a result, many people with diabetes check their blood glucose less often than they should.”

Physicians and medical researchers have thought about ways to measure glucose through the fluid in the eye for years, but have had trouble figuring out how best to capture and analyze those tears. Some companies, such as EyeSense

, have developed their own products to embed sensors in the eye to measure these levels, while other companies, such as Freedom Meditech, have explored measuring glucose levels through the eye by using light.

Parviz — who once led the Google Glass team — and Otis were colleagues at the University of Washington before moving over to Google’s department for developing “moonshot” projects, Google[x]. The company is still in the early days of the smart contact lens project, but officials said that it is in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration to figure out how to bring the product to market.

Hall is excited about the product but said that if the device interacts with apps from other companies, consumers will have to trust their security, too.

“One thing I do worry about is mobile security itself. It is a miasma, and the app that’s developed to use with this is probably going to be made by someone else,” he said. “Whoever is making that app will have to answer those questions. But they haven’t been answered yet because we haven’t gotten that far down the line.”