As technology moves further into treatment with remote consultations, monitoring and operations, robotic treatments, and advanced digital diagnosis, Google has seen the opportunity to apply its own eyewear technology (up until now limited as glasses called Google Glass) to the healthcare field.
Google’s 3D mobile technology and its offering around health record digitization form potential other strands of its expansion in the health market. Last month, it released the Google Fit platform to track exercise and sleep, among other health factors - but it is far from alone, as
Today, under a new development and licensing deal between Google and the Alcon eyewear division at Novartis, the two companies said they will create a smart contact lens that contains a low power microchip and an almost invisible, hair-thin electronic circuit. The lens can measure diabetics’ blood sugar levels directly from tear fluid on the surface of the eyeball. The system sends data to a mobile device to keep the individual informed.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the company wanted to use “the latest technology in ‘minituarisation’ of electronics” in order to improve people’s “quality of life”.
Google and Novartis' smart contact lenses prototype
Novartis chief executive Joe Jimenez added that technology as a whole, starting with smart eyewear, could be used to “manage human diseases”, and indicated that diseases will be mapped in the body using a range of other devices in the future - many of which are in development across universities and research laboratories.
An official timescale for the product’s development and commercialization has not been made public, though Jimenez said in Reuters and WSJ interviews respectively that the company “would hope to be able to commercialize it within about five years”, adding that it was expected to create a “large revenue stream”.
The combination of Google’s technology background and Novartis’ pharmaceutical knowledge would help meet “unmet medical needs”, Jimenez claimed.
The pharmaceutical firm is also looking into how to enable the contact lens technology to assess long sighted people’s vision and autofocus it on what they are looking at, working rather like an automatic camera lens when taking a picture. Such technology would help them avoid the need for glasses when reading or looking at other nearby objects.
The Google team involved in the contact lens development is called Google[x], and it focuses on “finding new solutions to big global problems” in healthcare and beyond, according to the companies.
The secretive Google[x] facility operates in Mountain View, California, and one of its most high profile projects has been a self driving car. It is also working closely on speech recognition, balloon powered internet access for rural areas, wind power, and technology for the Internet of Things - in which internet connected home, personal and city objects communicate with each other and take automatic action when different events take place.
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