Google Introduces New Smart Contact Lenses
Pharmaceutical company Novartis and Google have partnered up to develop a smart contact lens. This initiative is part of Google’s overarching theme to create devices that assist everyday jobs, especially in the healthcare industry.
Earlier this year, Google introduced its Google Glass smart glasses. The wearable technology is limited and currently only available to those in certain professions. Doctors have reportedly used Google Glass to assist them during surgeries, and can also be used to record or stream live feeds of surgeries to help educated surgeons all around the world.
Google and Novartis hope that developing a smart contact lens can help “manage human diseases” by monitoring and evaluating tear fluid, along with helping long sighted people’s vision by autofocusing on what the user is looking at, kind of like a camera lens. Joe Jimenez, Novartis’ Chief Executive, told The Wall Street Journal, “The move toward wearable health technology, like the smart lenses, was part of a broader trend to involve patients in managing their own health. Such technology has the potential to lower the cost of managing chronic disease”.
The group working on this project is referred to as Google [x] which operates in Mountain View, California. The latest project to come from this group is Google’s self-driving cars. Google and Novartis are aiming to make the contacts available to consumers within five years.
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