Category: contact lens

Google to make smart contact lenses that will monitor blood sugar

On By A.P.In contact lens, diabetes, Google, Jody Troupe, TechnologyLeave a comment

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If successful, Google’s newest venture could help to eliminate one of the most painful and intrusive daily routines of diabetics.

People with diabetes have difficulty controlling the level of sugar in their blood stream, so they need to monitor their glucose levels — typically by stabbing themselves with small pin pricks, swabbing their blood onto test strips and feeding them into an electronic reader.

Google’s smart contacts could potentially make blood sugar monitoring far less invasive.

The prototype contacts are outfitted with tiny wireless chips and glucose sensors, sandwiched between two lenses. They are able to measure blood sugar levels once per second, and Google is working on putting LED lights inside the lenses that would flash when those levels are too low or high.

The electronics in the lens are so small that they appear to be specks of glitter, Google said. The wireless antenna is thinner than a human hair.

They’re still in the testing phase and not yet ready for prime time. Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) has run clinical research studies, and the company is in discussions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Diabetes is a chronic problem, affecting about one in 19 people across the globe and one in 12 in the United States.

The smart contacts are being developed in Google’s famous Google X labs, a breeding ground for projects that could solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Google X labs is also working on driverless cars and balloons that transmit Wi-Fi signals to remote areas.

Google’s contact lens project isn’t the first attempt at building the technology. For many years, scientists have been investigating whether other body fluids, including tears, could be used to help people measure their glucose levels. In 2011, Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) partnered with the University of Washington to build contact lenses with small radios and glucose sensors.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/17/technology/innovation/google-contacts/

Thanks to Jody Troupe for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Breakthrough in Augmented Reality Contact Lens

On By A.P.In augmented reality, augmented reality contact lens, Belgium, Centre of Microsystems Technology, CMST, contact lens, Ghent University, LCD, spherical LCD, Technology, The Future, The SingularityLeave a comment

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The Centre of Microsystems Technology (CMST), imec’s associated laboratory at Ghent University (Belgium), has developed an innovative spherical curved LCD display, which can be embedded in contact lenses. The first step toward fully pixilated contact lens displays, this achievement has potential wide-spread applications in medical and cosmetic domains.

Unlike LED-based contact lens displays, which are limited to a few small pixels, imec’s innovative LCD-based technology permits the use of the entire display surface. By adapting the patterning process of the conductive layer, this technology enables applications with a broad range of pixel number and sizes, such as a one pixel, fully covered contact lens acting as adaptable sunglasses, or a highly pixilated contact lens display.

The first prototype presented December 5 contains a patterned dollar sign, depicting the many cartoons that feature people or figures with dollars in their eyes. It can only display rudimentary patterns, similar to an electronic pocket calculator. In the future, the researchers envision fully autonomous electronic contact lenses embedded with this display. These next-generation solutions could be used for medical purposes, for example to control the light transmission toward the retina in case of a damaged iris, or for cosmetic purposes such as an iris with a tunable color. In the future, the display could also function as a head-up display, superimposing an image onto the user’s normal view. However, there are still hurdles to overcome for broader consumer and civilian implementation.

“Normally, flexible displays using liquid crystal cells are not designed to be formed into a new shape, especially not a spherical one. Thus, the main challenge was to create a very thin, spherically curved substrate with active layers that could withstand the extreme molding processes,” said Jelle De Smet, the main researcher on the project. “Moreover, since we had to use very thin polymer films, their influence on the smoothness of the display had to be studied in detail. By using new kinds of conductive polymers and integrating them into a smooth spherical cell, we were able to fabricate a new LCD-based contact lens display.”

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-btRUzoKYEA

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121205090931.htm