Scientists Develop Glucose-Tracking Smart Contact Lenses Comfortable Enough To Wear (engadget.com) 35
A team of Korean scientists have developed a smart lens that could help diabetics track blood glucose levels while remaining stretchable enough to be comfortable and transparent enough to preserve vision. Engadget reports:
The lens achieves its flexibility thanks to a design that puts its electronics into isolated pockets linked by stretchable conductors. There's also an elastic material in between that spreads the strain to prevent the electronics from breaking when you pinch the lens. And when the refractive indices all line up, you should get a lens that's as transparent as possible and largely stays out of your way. The sensor in question is straightforward: an LED light stays on as long as glucose levels are normal, and shuts off when something's wrong. Power comes through a metal nanofiber antenna that draws from a nearby power source coil. That's about the only major drawback -- the low conductivity of the antenna means that you can't just tuck the coil wherever it's convenient. The co-author of the study, Jang-Ung Park, told IEEE Spectrum that a commercial version of the contact lens should arrive within the next five years.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Alternately, if you don't let the doctor remove your pancreas when needed, you won't have diabetes in the first place.
Of course, you may be dead, but that's a small price to pay for no diabetes, right?
Yes, some of us have diabetes for reasons completely unrelated to eating junk....
Re: How about (Score:2)
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As I diabetic, I can tell when my blood sugar is high - my eyes hurt and it becomes harder to see. In fact, for over a year before I was diagnosed, I kept going to doctors, opticians and even the eye hospital complaining my eyes hurt. They all said "There is nothing wrong with your eyes". As soon as I was diagnosed and given Metformin, the discomfort went away - but it comes back if my blood sugar gets high.
Most Type 2 Diabetes can be reversed via diet (Score:2)
A high tech solution for monitoring blood sugar sounds good especially for type 1 diabetics -- but for most people with type 2 it would be better to just reverse the disease entirely.
Example books on how to do this:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/shop... [drfuhrman.com]
http://media.wholefoodsmarket.... [wholefoodsmarket.com]
As Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, most prescriptions for drugs for chronic diseases are just permission slips keep doing unhealthy behavior.
tl;dr -- Eat (whole) food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
And even Type 1 diabetes can be greatly impr
Totally Backwards? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would the LED be ON to signify 'normal'? Seems like the last thing I'd want is a light shining in my eye most of the time. Seems like a red blip for HIGH glucose and a blue blip for LOW would be great, or at least something similar.
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Why would the LED be ON to signify 'normal'? Seems like the last thing I'd want is a light shining in my eye most of the time. Seems like a red blip for HIGH glucose and a blue blip for LOW would be great, or at least something similar.
Duh.
How would you distinguish between "broken" and "flat battery" using your armchair-engineer methodology?
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It doesn't seem like the chosen approach can distinguish between the two either. I'm with the OP. If there is a reason why this approach was chosen, it would be good to know.
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It doesn't seem like the chosen approach can distinguish between the two either.
When you only have two states, you can't distinguish among three conditions. What you can do, however, is cluster all the "bad" conditions together, which is what they did here:
LED on = copacetic.
LED off = something's wrong = notification to user so they can fix it.
If there is a reason why this approach was chosen, it would be good to know.
As GP said, if LED off was the happy state, you could have a power or other issue with the lens and think everything was fine in the neighborhood while your blood sugar was off the charts.
"Fail safe" is (or used to be, and still should be) sta
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The problem with this is that the LED off state could tell the user that there is a blood sugar problem when there really isn't one. And for diabetics, fixing a problem which isn't there can result in a condition that is just as dangerous / life-threatening. So, this isn't fail-safe by any means.
I agree with you, that two states can't distinguish between three conditions. But until the device fixes that problem, the chosen approach is just as bad as the one the OP was advocating (and me too). In that case,
Idiot light is backward? (Score:1)
I don't understand this. The light goes out when there is a poblem? Backward of everything else in the world? Who sees this light?
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You're not thinking hard enough. People need to know if the battery is working or not.
Nice description (Score:2)
Lenses that you can actually _wear_ and also you can _see_ something though it?
I'm flabbergasted. I guess the previous version were dark shot-glasses.
Glucose monitor (Score:4, Insightful)
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Link to the actual study (Score:5, Informative)
With a lot more details and illustrations. As the summary hinted, the big issue appears to be how close the wireless power coil has to be to the lens: 5mm in testing.
http://advances.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I hope this is the first step, and over time they can get a power source farther and farther away, maybe to be worn as an earring or nose-ring or necklace.
A binary flag (good/bad) is useless (Score:2)
T1 and T2 diabetics need much more information than a simple binary +/-.
To be useful, a glucometer must provide a continuous readout of your glucose level. Based on that number, 1) a T1 knows how much insulin to inject, or 2) a T2 knows how much excess glucose they just ate, so they can adjust their diet or medication dose.
Raising a binary flag is worthless. This company's gadget is a gimmick, intended to announce victory before a competitor can steal their thunder with a *real* product.
Needs to include AI image processing (Score:1)
Then, whenever the wearer sees a huge cake, the lenses could blank it out.