A New Way Of Viewing Diabetes Treatment

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Google Glass is a technology that can only be described as futuristic. 

You can literally check your FaceBook, where you can like my page (I was told to be more subtle in my self promotion... let me know if that was good), browse the net, look at your schedule and take awesome point of view videos without a computer or handheld device!

But it's not exactly Dolce and Gabbana... 

What if I was to tell you that Google is refining this idea and putting all this technology into a contact lens... 

Cool right? 

What I find coolest about this is their business model. 

Not only are they making it possible to check your emails on a boring date, they're also using the idea to help people. 

And making billions off it too.

Tears have a potential for showing accurate blood glucose (sugar) levels. But you can't really get diabetes patients, who need to check their levels every 24 hours, to have a good cry on a daily basis, right? 

Well Google is planning to put an end to the daily near blood test Diabetes sufferers have to put up with.

Ouch.

They've released a press statement from their most innovative R&D department, GoogleX, stating their intent to develop this contact lens to monitor blood glucose levels. They plan to use LED lights on their billion dollar baby to alert patients (and their doctors) when the glucose levels have "crossed above or below certain thresholds," making life much easier for patients who suffer from heart disease, kidney failure and liver disease that ultimately end the lives of soon to be number 1 killer in Australia.

Diabetes affects 380 million people.

That's 1/20 people. 

Worldwide.

That number will double by 2030. 

And, on average, for type 2 diabetes (90% of cases), you have the it for 7 years before you even have it diagnosed. So there's probably a lot more people suffering from it than we think.

Google helps people with this invention and stands to make 10% of the world need their product. And on top of that, it's pretty damn cool.

This is brilliant. 

But what are other benefits that this technology could bring? 

Not only is this invention helping sufferers of this disease who potentially get near fatal blood sugar level dips and rises from things like eating and exercising, it can also lead to advancements in controlling and maybe even curing diabetes. 

Emergency situations where insulin is needed quickly can be mitigated with something that constantly monitors your glucose levels. This can save the lives and limbs (literally) of the nearly half billion already suffering from disease. 

And with this disease, it often takes patients years of blood testing, dieting and dosage testing (where you literally use yourself as a guinea pig)  to find an optimum blood glucose level they can maintain. 
This has the potential to reduce that time to minutes. 

But the biggest potential of this technology, which can read your glucose levels in a second, lies in the ability to test the effectiveness of new drugs and the impacts of diet in a heartbeat. This will save HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS in drug development, making drug investment a less risky and costly investment than it is today. 

This will lead to more drugs being discovered (and not only those helping diabetes patients by the way) quicker. And it will also allow us to test the effectiveness of dieting options more reliably too - because, especially in chronic diseases like this, drugs are not always the best option.

Diabetes is not the only thing this can help.

Your eyeballs aren't just limited to revealing your blood sugar levels. There are possibilities this could be expanded further. 

Your eyes can also be potentially used to monitor heart rate, and maybe even blood pressure, which can help in emergency hospital situations and in chronic sufferers of heart failure and other such diseases much less intrusively, and restrictively, than the blood pressure cuffs and manual pulse taking we are forced to use today. 

And if this kind of technology can be developed to monitor your circulatory system, that is, your blood, you can also test the effectiveness of all drugs without having to take blood tests every day, again saving millions, scratch that, billions in the drug development process.
There will be a blog post about ideas to help drug development too by the way! And soon too. 

Of course, you can easily monitor eye movement and blinking with this kind of technology, which will help millions of people suffering from sleep apnoea (lack of sleep that often goes hand in hand with obesity and being overweight, affecting 50% of the developed world's population) and the probably billion or so who can't get a good nights sleep too!

And on top of that, you can still use this to subscribe to my blog (by email, on the right hand side) and like my FaceBook page too. How's that for subtlety?

https://www.facebook.com/musingsofamedstudentpatient

This technology is not here yet. The model shown above is only a prototype. But with billions of people who'd possibly benefit from it, I'm pretty sure it'll be here soon.