Google announced yesterday that it will partner with Novartis to come up with a ‘smart’ contact lens that can monitor blood sugar levels.
This recent agreement is yet another of recent moves in the health care sector by tech giants, such as Apple, Google and Samsung, to develop new technologies to track aspects of people’s daily lives.
Novartis said this week that its eye care unit Alcon had come up with a deal to license smart lens technology from one of the research divisions at Google.
Alcon stated that it would try to create products from a prototype smart lens created by Google. It uses tiny sensors and a radio antenna that is thinner than a human hair to track the glucose levels of the patient.
Blood sugar level data, which is critical to people who have diabetes, could then be uploaded to a smart phone and used by health professionals and patients to monitor this critical data in real time.
The CEO of Novartis said that his firm had tried to develop a contact lens that monitors glucose levels but had failed. This attempt is a bit different because Google’s engineers are involved. One of the toughest issues was miniaturization, and Google’s engineers have been very effective at downsizing the technology so that it can be incorporated into a lens.
One of the founders of Google (which has removed author photo from search results), Sergey Brin, said that the smart lens technology could boost the life quality of millions of people.
This push to develop medical technology is coming as some of the biggest tech firms in the world are trying to find new growth areas. Apple has come up with new health tracking tools that can monitor your footsteps, heart rates and sleep patterns. Now Google is working on monitoring glucose levels. Quite an interesting time to be following tech trends, even as Google continues to change up how it makes its AdWords Quality Scores.