A new way of monitoring diabetes through the use of contact lenses was released by Google on Thursday, the Associated Press reported.
Google unveiled their prototype of a contact lense with a built in monitor to keep track of glucose levels through the persons tears, according to the AP.
Google says the prototype will not reach consumers for another five years but added the contact lenses are one of several devices being created to monitor diabetes without the traditional practice of drawing blood, the AP reported.
Built within the lense is a glucose sensor placed outside the iris and out of eyesight as well as a wireless transmitter, according to the AP. A micro-system was also built in to pull in energy from radio frequencies allowing one glucose reading per second.
"It doesn't look like much, but it was a crazy amount of work to get everything so very small," Brian Otis, one of the lead researchers at Google, told the AP
Google has been developing the lenses for the past 18 months in the same lab where the driverless car was brought to fruition, as well as Google's Web-surfing eyeglasses, the AP reported. However, the University of Washington began research on the contact lenses many years ago.
"You can take it to a certain level in an academic setting, but at Google we were given the latitude to invest in this project," Otis said, according to the AP. "The beautiful thing is we're leveraging all of the innovation in the semiconductor industry that was aimed at making cellphones smaller and more powerful."
Before the contact lenses can be used as a medical device, it would need to be tested for accuracy, safety and as good and useful as other measuring devices, the AP reported.
