Google's Smart Contact Lens is like your contact lens, except it's a whole lot smarter.
Image: Google
Google’s plan to bring smart contact lenses to diabetes sufferers inched closer to reality as the company secured two patents last week for the cutting edge, biometric sensor technology.
Known among scientists as “Ophthalmic Electrochemical Sensors,” these
contact lenses will feature flexible electronics that include sensors
and an antenna. The sensors are designed to read chemicals in the tear
fluid of the wearer’s eye and alert her, possibly through a little
embedded LED light, when her blood sugar falls to dangerous levels.
According to the patent:
“Human tear fluid contains a variety of inorganic
electrolytes (e.g., Ca.sup.2+, Mg.sup.2+, Cl.sup.-), organic solutes
(e.g., glucose, lactate, etc.), proteins, and lipids. A contact lens
with one or more sensors that can measure one or more of these
components provides a convenient, non-invasive platform to diagnose or
monitor health related problems. An example is a glucose sensing contact
lens that can potentially be used for diabetic patients to monitor and
control their blood glucose level.
Google’s project is one of a number of in-eye wearable sensor technologies
currently under development at universities and research facilities
around the country. However, with two patents in hand Google’s project
may have a leg up on the competition.
This side view of the smart lens show the polymeric material and the embedded substrate (230)Image: Google
The patents also offer a rare opportunity to see how Google and its
research partners envision the Smart Contact lens fitting on the human
eye.
For example, Google intends to both communicate and power the
electronics-embedded contact lens with a pair of antennas, though the
patent notes that these two functions could be embedded within one
antenna.
These images show how the
lens would sit on the human eye (10) and how the eyelids (30 and 32)
would close over it. When the lids distribute tears over the eye, they
will also, by design, coat both the convex and concave surface of the
smart lens.
Image: Google
As for how the eye can see past the thinner-than-a-strand-of-hair
electronics, the patent notes that the substrate is too close to the eye
to be in focus and it’s positioned away from the center of the eye and,
thereby, away from where light is transmitted to the retina. It also
notes that the substrate can be made of transparent (read:
“see-through”) materials.
Google, which announced the project in January,
still has to get FDA approval before anyone starts wearing smart
contact lenses. Still, it’s clear that glucose level detection is merely
scratching the surface of the potential for these lenses. If Google can
effectively build free-standing, communication-ready electronics in a
transparent device roughly the size of a standard contact lens, there’s
no telling what other kinds of smarts the lens will eventually be able
to support. Could Google Glass Contact Lenses be far behind?
It's still unclear how long before Google plans on commercializing the smart contact lens research project.
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