Challenge
Fitting contact lenses with sensors to monitor health conditions
Traditionally, diabetics measure their glucose by pricking their finger with a tracker that uses a test strip to process your blood content. These trackers have a multitude of common problems including low battery issues, damaged or expired test strips, not enough blood flow from finger prick and more. Having a device that monitors glucose levels simply by wearing a contact lens in the eye could be the next evolution monitoring glucose levels, and hopefully other chronic diseases as well.
These contact lenses, able to take glucose readings once a second from your tears, present the exciting prospect of replacing finger-prick tests or current continuous monitoring systems, which require the user to have a device attached to their blood stream. Incorporating a miniaturized glucose sensor and a wireless antenna thinner than a human hair, each lens draws in and analyses tiny amounts of tear fluid through a tiny pinhole in its surface.
In addition to the glucose monitoring lens, Alcon and Google are now collaborating on developing lenses which would address weaknesses in vision, both measuring and correcting for the user's optical prescription. No doubt this is just the beginning: as the technology develops for these initial uses, it seems highly likely that further possibilities will arise.