Alphabet Unit Halts Glucose-Detecting Contact Lens Project (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report from Reuters: Alphabet's life sciences division Verily said on Friday that it was putting on hold one of its oldest and highest-profile projects, a smart contact lens designed to help monitor sugar levels. The project, started in 2014, aimed to help diabetics better manage their blood sugar levels by embedding sensors on a contact lens to monitor the glucose levels in their tears. In a blog update, Verily cited here insufficient consistency in the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. On the bright side, Alphabet and Verily said they would continue to work on two other "Smart Lens" projects -- one for presbyopia (far-sightedness), and another to improve sight following cataract surgery.

Comments

presbyopia != far-sightedness (exactly)

[starless]

one for presbyopia (far-sightedness)

It's a bit over-simplyfying things to refer to presbyopia as far-sightedness.
Presbyopia is the loss, with age, of the ability to accommodate or change focus.
The net result may be the loss of ability to focus on nearby objects, but simple far-sightedness would be "hyperopia"

Re: Verily I say unto you

[schure]

Problem is the public doesn't think of Google as an ordinary agglomeration of human beings anymore...

Thank you for trying

[Anonymous Coward]

Medical research is not cheap and the regulatory hurdles are huge.

Re: Thank you for trying

[Xarin]

Exactly. Not sure what the news is. Company comes up with an idea, company researches idea, company obtains hard data, company analyzed data and finds out hypothesis is wrong. Repeat with a new hypothesis. If they went to market knowing it would not work, that would be an issue. Thank you for doing the right thing.

Re: Thank you for trying

[duckintheface]

The explanation that there is a lack of correlation between glucose in tears and blood makes no sense. This is the first thing researchers would look at. If there was not a good correlation, the lens project would never have begun. There may be a problem with a correlation with *lens measured* glucose and blood glucose, but that just means that the lens measurement is wrong.

Re: Thank you for trying

[Hognoxious]

Company comes up with an idea, company researches idea, company obtains hard data, company analyzed data, snowflake tardennials are frightened they might catch diabetes, snowflake tardennials throw a tantrum, management caves in.

FTFY

Presbyopia is not farsightedness

[Anonymous Coward]

Presbyopia is age related degeneration of ability to adjust your eye's focus, typically on near objects. Farsightedness is quite different and caused by other factors.

Re:Not surprising

[retchdog]

the "theory" is called Raman spectroscopy and it's been oversold in a bunch of bullshit pseudo-scientific products recently.

Well, that didn't start at Google anyway

[93 Escort Wagon]

Parviz brought that with him to Google from his short tenure at UW, and he moved over to Amazon several years ago. When you can't claim you (or your employee, at least) invented something, it probably becomes less interesting to the Goog.

Alcohol Breathalyser, THC, and glucose.

[labnet]

We use to manufacture alcohol breathalysers.. the proper ones that used used platinum cell catalysation. Alcohol in the blood has a ratio to alcohol in the breath of 2300:1. This is why law enforcement in many countries can prosecute based on breath alcohol sample because of its well established ratio to what's in your blood.
So we were approached to do the same for 'weed' aka THC. There is a dye called Fast Blue B that changes colour in the presence of THC vapour. Well, to cut a very long and interesting story short, it turns out there is no real relation to THC in blood to breath because of the volatility difference of the molecules.
Glucose is another dastardly hard thing to measure without going directly to blood. The holy grail of reliable non invasive glucose monitoring for diabetics is still elusive, but good on Alphabet (such a dumb name) for trying.