The Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis announced that it is contracting Google’s “smart contact lens” technology, a project that is currently being worked on by the Google X team. According to Fox News, the company has been testing a prototype contact lens that would help people with diabetes manage their disease.
The company’s eye care division, Alcon, will license Google’s smart lens and co-develop them for a variety of ocular medical uses.
According to a piece done by Mashable, the lenses have ophthalmic electrochemical sensors in them that are designed to measure glucose levels via tear fluid in the eye and offer real-time updates to an app on a connected mobile device for people with diabetes. Google secured a patent for the technology earlier this year.
“We’ve always said that we’d seek out projects that seem a bit speculative or strange,” according to the official Google Blog, “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.”
In addition to glucose measurement, Novartis says another key issue it would like to address with these “smart lenses” is the potential to provide accommodative vision correction to people with presbyopia, an age-related eye condition that affects billions, making it difficult to focus on objects nearby. However, details on how that might work are currently unavailable.
“Our dream is to use the latest technology in the miniaturization of electronics to help improve the quality of life for millions of people,” Google founder Sergey Brin wrote in a Novartis press release. “We are very excited to work with Novartis to make this dream come true.”
Alcon’s division head Jeff George said that the companies aim to “unlock a new frontier to jointly address the unmet medical needs of millions of eye care patients around the world.”
There are no details yet about when the first smart contact lenses might hit the market . According to Mashable, Alcon’s director of global external communications, Elizabeth Harness Murphy said that it is “way too early in the agreement and way too early in the prototype development” to project when smart lenses will arrive. She also made clear that terms of the deal are not being released.
