Google is Getting into the Medical Device Market with Contact Lens for Diabetics

Google—yes, the Internet search engine that most of use daily to find a restaurant, look up song lyrics or info about a favorite hobby—is getting into the medical device business. The company announced that it is testing a prototype for a contact lens that would help people with diabetes manage their disease.

According to Google, the lens would measure glucose in tears continuously using a wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor. Google says that using the lenses would be a less invasive method of measuring glucose levels than the traditional finger pricking that uses blood and testing meters.

It also claims that the more frequent testing would consequently reduce the risks associated with infrequent glucose testing such as kidney failure and blindness.

Glucose levels change frequently with normal activity such as exercising or eating or even sweating.

 

Sudden spikes or precipitous drops are dangerous and not uncommon, requiring round-the-clock monitoring. 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.

“It’s disruptive, and it’s painful. And, as a result, many people with diabetes check their blood glucose less often than they should,” according to Google’s contact lens project team. 

The contact lenses were developed during the past 18 months in the clandestine Google X lab that also came up with a driverless car, Google’s Web-surfing eyeglasses and Project Loon, a network of large balloons designed to beam the Internet to unwired places.

“We wondered if miniaturized electronics — think chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair — might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy,” Google’s project leads said in a recent blog post. “We hope a tiny, super sensitive glucose sensor embedded in a contact lens could be the first step in showing how to measure glucose through tears, which in the past has only been theoretically possible.”

The chip and sensor would be embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material, while a pinhole in the lens would allow fluid from the surface of the eye to seep into the sensor. Google built the wireless chips in clean rooms, and used advanced engineering to get integrated circuits and a glucose sensor into such a small space.Researchers also had to build in a system to pull energy from incoming radio frequency waves to power the device enough to collect and transmit one glucose reading per second. The embedded electronics in the lens don’t obscure vision because they lie outside the eye’s pupil and iris.

Google is looking for partners with experience bringing similar products to market. While excited about the prototype, Google warned that there is still a lot more work that needs to be done before it reaches consumers. Google estimates it will take at least five years to reach the market.  

“We’re in discussions with the FDA, but there’s still a lot more work to do to turn this technology into a system that people can use,” the projects co-founders wrote. “We’re not going to do this alone. We plan to look for partners who are experts in bringing products like this to market. These partners will use our technology for a smart contact lens and develop apps that would make the measurements available to the wearer and their doctor. We’ve always said that we’d seek out projects that seem a bit speculative or strange, and at a time when the International Diabetes Federation is declaring that the world is ‘losing the battle’ against diabetes, we thought this project was worth a shot.”

Many medical device companies—of all sizes—are working on glucose monitoring technology to make testing for diabetic patients more convenient and less invasive than traditional finger pricks.

According to the Millennium Research Group the U.S. diabetes device market will be worth $16 billion.