>We’re in discussions with the FDA, but there’s still a lot more work to do to turn this technology into a system that people can use
I'm chomping at the bit. Anyone familiar with process know how soon this could possibly be available?
> how soon this could possibly be available?
I've been following various type 1 research for as long as I can remember (runs in the family, myself etc.), and I remember a similar enthusiasm back when glucose watches were first in production. I recall it taking years before they had an actual product (this was before the Panic Room featured watch, which wasn't a glucose measurement, but anyway.. to give you a time reference), and sadly, even when they were available from more than one manufacturer, they were still not widely available to patients (i.e. wanting to get one).
None the less, I will be following this eagerly.
On a personal note, awolf: how do you like your current monitoring system (apart from the mentioned downsides)? I've considered needle monitoring many times, but never gone for it (for idle office work I wouldn't mind, but I see it as a hinder in my personal life re: flexibility)
PS: Accuracy is not even a factor until the technology is further along, and that was one of the main issues with the watches back in the day: measuring glucose levels through human skin was not accurate or reliable enough. So I'd add years of testing at least, and maybe tweaking aswel (as the watch project did).
The movie in which a child has a severe low blood sugar, on the edge of death, and her mother administers here a large shot of... insulin! I could not believe it when I saw it. The treatment given in the movie would have killed her in no time.
For future reference, in case anyone comes across a diabetic experiencing a seizure. Do not give insulin in this case. This will lower blood sugar further. What they need is to consume anything with sugar, if conscious. If not, they need a glucagon injection. These typically come in a clunky red container, containing a large needle filled with saline and a vile containing a white powder. Shoot the saline into the vile, shake up the vile, extract the solution, then shoot the solution into the affected person's leg ASAP. Do not give anyone insulin under any circumstances. If you give someone glucagon with a high blood sugar, they will probably be ok. If you give someone insulin with a low blood sugar, they will likely be dead. /PSA
Babak explains why the surface of the eye is such a good area to measure various health indicators.
they have to prove that the monitoring it provides is accurate, measures what they think it does (I.e. no false positives or negatives), and doesn't v endanger the users lives (I.e. doesn't blind them I see the proposed led being an issue here since it can go off at night, and likely that it doesn't have a severe lag time that would reduce the likelihood of a life saving response because the user isn't checking blood sugar otherwise). I think all of these are definitely solvable issues so I would be surprised if it doesn't get anywhere. the specialized nature of the contact is likely not going to be an issue since the market is desperate for something better (every diabetic I know would switch to this in a blink). what I wonder is what the communication with the device is going to be like, smartphone would be nice but some of the smart watches I think would be better, and how is it powered too.
I see what you did there.
I'm sure it will be expensive, but doubt it would need to be disposable: current CGMs rely on injecting a metal sensor into subcutaneous fat. After about a week your body starts to heal around it and the sensor becomes ineffective. Do to the nature of the application process, there is no way to re-inject a sensor once used. The sensors are on the order of $50 each, so $50/week.
We have discovered a lot of Google X technologies in the last months. It seems that Google X is really working. We may have to stop having fun of Google+.
They are attempting to stay relevant and perceived to be an innovative company in the eyes of their various stakeholders (employees, potential employees, shareholders, tech press, the general public, regulators, etc.) while transitioning to today's Microsoft.
Google+, honestly, is awesome. The auto-awesome feature is the coolest thing ever.
It looks like Google poached MSFT's engineers to work on this -- Babak Parviz was working on this at Microsoft 3 years ago, and is now cofounder of the smart contact lens team at Google.
[1]: Functional Contact Lens Monitors Blood Sugar Without Needles (http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/dl.aspx?id=150832)
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/stories/nu...
>Tan and Microsoft Research Connections have been great supporters of the project, Parviz said. Their willingness to explore and invest in the project was critical to advancing research and development of the functional lens. “A lot of people considered it science fiction,” Parviz says. “Desney and Microsoft Research were actually, very early on, convinced that this is perhaps a worthy cause. And they were willing to work with us, and support us. And I’m very grateful they did.”
If people are interested, here is a relevant research paper in IEEE about the massive potential contact lenses have to mate technology and bioinformatics: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-realit...
This particular implementation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6g581tJ7bM#t=10m15s
For anyone who does not know, type I diabetes is not something you can just follow a doctor's direction on and be ok. Even if you follow your doctor perfectly, there can still be serious complications, and type I diabetics with the best control are actually more likely to die from severe low blood sugars.
The reason for this is that the optimum blood glucose level is around 100. <70 and you start to be severely mentally impaired, making it difficult at times to seek treatment (finding and eating sugar, in a nutshell). On the flip side, if you are lax on insulin, your blood sugar might hover around 250 for months, and you will feel close to normal. Having a blood glucose this high on a long term basis will have long term effects that are what kill most diabetics in the long run. A low blood sugar, however, can be fatal within minutes to hours.
Either way, a continuous feedback mechanism would help tight control diabetics, and diabetics who do the minimum. Tight controllers could get faster feedback about when they are going into the serious danger zone without having to initiate any action (checking blood sugar), and lax diabetics would get a constant reminder of how they are letting there life slip away (which they normally would rarely see, since they hardly ever check their blood sugar anyway).
I have to say though, I am still a bit skeptical for a few reasons:
- One, I have been told about this sort of miracle technology ever since I was diagnosed 15 years ago.
- Two, the medical complex locks down their tech and extracts the maximum value out. There is not a single glucose device on the market that lets you extract the data out of your glucose monitor and crunch the data how you want. I have worked on hacking these devices to extract data and the legal verbiage around these activities has strongly discouraged me from releasing anything. Previous continuous glucose monitoring systems. These companies would prefer you rot in the dark, than to lose one bit of profit.
- Three, if one of these devices is not 100% perfect, it gets shot down and banned from the market. This is probably a combination of profit-motivated industry and caution-motivated government. A great example of this is a continuous glucose monitoring, non-invasive watch that came out ~ a decade ago. It was on the market for several years, before being banned. I, like just about every person in the thread I linked, would pay $10k+ for one of these, despite the reduced accuracy over traditional devices. Entrepreneurs in the health industry take note.
[1] [http://www.diabetesdaily.com/forum/testing-blood-sugar/61908...]
I'm very much in this crowd. Type 1, AIC of 6.3, LDL cholesterol around 100, BP of 110/72-75. This is with completely manual testing and subcutaneous insulin injections.
The problem of keeping your blood sugar towards an A1C of 6 is you have insulin reactions. Quite often, as you're being rather aggressive in keeping on top of your blood sugar. Worse, is I don't show or feel any real physiological symptoms until I'm at 60 mg/dL or below, which is getting fairly dangerous. I can be as low as 25-30 mg/dL and still be conscious and functioning. My tipoff is realizing that I either feel tired or that I can't think straight. It's hard to realize you're not thinking straight when you can't think straight, and have the cognizance to then test and get some carbs in you.
I've had a few close calls. One where I was driving a supercar north on Route 24 in Boston rush-hour traffic. I subconsciously took an exit and drove 5 miles into a suburb, and managed to not hit anything and the police officer told me I mostly obeyed traffic laws, aside from weaving about (but was completely incoherent) -- I was at 21 mg/dL when the EMTs tested me.
I once didn't compensate for alcohol, passed out on my couch, and when I finally came to in a pool of my own sweat, it took me 3 hours to traverse 30 feet to the kitchen to attempt to drink (and wear at least half) of a half-gallon of orange juice. When I finally tested 30 minutes after consuming an entire carton of OJ, I was barely in the 40s -- I have no idea how low I was, and I was lucky I ever regained consciousness.
Weird that you don't see any symptoms at such a low level. My vision would completely black out except for maybe half a centimeter blurry hole... everyday. It took hours to recover. I was always munching on snacks to prevent low blood sugar but it never helped. Thankfully I'm alright now.
For anyone here not familiar with this phenomenon; it is referred to as "Dead in Bed Syndrome" This is where your blood sugar suddenly drops while you are sleeping and you don't notice the drop because you are sleeping; you then progress into a coma and then die.
To this day I almost never am able to sleep straight through the night because of the sheer dread I have that this will happen to me (In fact I'm posting this at about 3:30am where I am at, because once again I'm up in the middle of the night).
In well controlled diabetics about 55% of all severe low blood sugars occur while you are sleeping. And in type 1 diabetics about 6% of us will die in our sleep by age 40.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1826245 http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-complications/dead-in-bed... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2551657/
"It appears that such deaths occur in 6% of all deaths in diabetic patients below age 40 years."
So, it's not that 6% of diabetics will die in their sleep before they are 40, but of those that die before they are 40, 6% die I their sleep.
That makes the risk per hour of dying in your sleep about a tenth of that of dying while awake. I would guess that is relatively large compared to non-diabetics, but probably nowhere as freaky as you portray it it be.
Further evidence: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8542738 shows 16 such deaths in Norway in a ten year period, with 224 other deaths (during the day, or at night, but not matching the criteria for death in bed syndrome)
Also, http://www.fhi.no/eway/default.aspx?pid=240&trg=List_6673&Ma... shows about 20 type I diabetics per 100.000 Norwegians. With 5.000.000 Norwegians, that gives about 10.000 type I diabetics, of which about two die each year of this cause.
http://www.bayerdiabetes.co.uk/sections/products-for-my-diab...
IMO, every meter should be required to export to CSV at a bare minimum. I will look into the one you linked, but for most users, they really need something that can be easily converted to an xls. The current state of things is that they only export to some supremely terrible proprietary program that is really only meant for an endocrinologist to use with the help of an IT team.
I should be able to easily view my health data and crunch it how I see fit. Decent analytics around my glucose data would be extremely valuable, but the current state of affairs is abysmal.
My mother has been full on diabetic for thirty plus years. She uses a pump now as it does offer some convenience over just using needles. It still is not easy.
The problem I see with this technology is that her biggest threat is at night. She can go to bed with perfectly fine blood sugar levels, just like any other night, and wake up with a level in the forties. What worked good for her? Besides an attentive spouse a dog works wonders too.
Still I haven't seen an accurate blood sugar monitor, there are variances depending on where they are placed on the body and even at times the same place may not yield similar numbers each week. The same goes for where her pump connects, some weeks its a great spot, another week a similar spot isn't quite the same.
Top it off with, her comment about asking three doctors in day and getting four opinions. The flip side of low blood sugar is silly high numbers. Going to the hospital with 300, or worse 600 plus, and having to debate the emergency room staff that you know whats happening isn't fun. Having to have your level tested three or four times because they cannot believe your functional at those levels is a sign of how much even much of the medical world has problems with this disease.
I am all for new technologies but I believe your chances lie in first not ignoring the diagnoses, second making sure to take the medicine assigned; especially your insulin; third, enlisting your family and even friends in emergency treatment aids, fourth being purely your genetics, and finally knowing when to doubt a medical professional and how to engage them intelligently.
I too would pay $10k+ for one of these for precisely the reason you mentioned above: adding years to my life.
Conversion is mg/dl -> mmol/l divide by 18 approx.
See http://www.soc-bdr.org/rds/authors/unit_tables_conversions_a...
Note, this is only for glucose; there are different factors depending on what is measured, e.g. cholesterol is different.
How would reduced accuracy really help you? I'm imagining that it could be worse since it could introduce anxiety...
Please correct me if I've misconstrued.
"Functional Contact Lens Monitors Blood Sugar Without Needles"
The fundamental problem is that glucose levels in non-blood fluids do not exactly match blood glucose. The current monitor solutions use interstitial fluid in the skin. They still require the user to test themselves several times a day and recalibrate the monitor based on blood glucose, and they can't alert the user if their blood sugar is low until it's already a serious situation. They also frequently give false positives.
This is a new (but very clever!) way to do something that has been around for a while, not a revolution, unless tears track blood glucose much closer than interstitial fluid does. Simply based on first principles, that seems unlikely.
And there are basic hygiene problems wearing contacts while you're asleep, which is when monitoring would be most useful. If google has the technology to make contact lenses that you can wear 24*7 without getting ulcerative keratitis, that's more revolutionary than another way to monitor blood sugar.
overnight and extended-wear contacts (for up to a month, I believe) have been available for many years now.
Then, a later version will need to solve the problem of projecting crisp images from the contact lens onto the user's retina. Google's experience with Glass seems like it could inform that effort. Perhaps we'll see this product on the market with significant usage within 10 years.
Augmented reality contact lenses have other implications. For example: what does it mean for privacy and advertising to not being able to shut one's eyes?
1. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/517476/google-glass-tod...
Crossing my fingers very hard. Want this to be reality.
I was careful w/ calibrations, tried for months, spoke w/ people at the company, etc etc...it just wasn't worth the effort for me. Maybe they're better now, haven't tried in about 3 years.
That was the final straw for me, but the effort around these CGMs is also not to be understated. Calibrations, extra items to lug around attached to your body, extra pieces that can break / not work, etc etc. Anything that helps with this is huge.
When I think of the big picture I realize that Type I Diabetes is nothing compared to the health issues many people deal with, and I consider myself _extremely_ lucky. That being said, it's a daily battle that you never, ever get a break from. Personally, the CGMs didn't make the battle (or my results) much better.
Who knows if this technology would be any better, but I can cross my fingers. I would gladly pay almost all spare money I have for a CGM guaranteed to be both accurate (keep me healthy) and reliable/simple (keep me sane).
I am discouraged by the fact that the underlying technology (measuring glucose from tears) was first reported more than two years ago. There is another (sort of) non-invasive glucose measuring technology that involves injecting a biofluorescent dye under the skin, then using a device that measures the fluorescence that varies with the blood glucoe levels. This technology was also first reported years ago, and is also apparently nowhere near being available.
Could be an interesting study on cause/effect - is all this sitting at screens contributing to an epidemic or are there other factors ? Perhaps respondents are just self-selecting because of the subject matter ?
It's also interesting how anyone who needs to track their blood sugars likes the idea of an easier and more convenient method - typical finger prick readings up to 4 times a day can leave your fingers in a real mess and pretty painful so even sticking something to your eyeballs sounds attractive !
Type II is caused by external influences, such as unhealty life-style, old age, or other medical conditions (which include genetic defects or other genetic variations).
Type I is genetic. If you have the faulty genes, you get it. Regardless of lifestyle, health, country and whatnot.
Another thing many people are confused with, is "severety of Diabetes". You can have "very severe Type II" or "just a little Type II", but you cannot have "severe Type I", Type I is binary: you have it or you don't.
As a Type I, I'd love to see the medical world and then the rest of us, using a different term for Type I Diabetics, because the deseases are entirely different: the cause is different, the effect is similar.
As a Type I, people often blame me for my desease. Often people think it is because of unhealty lifestyle. "Ah you are a diabetic, many programmers have Diabetes, guess its because they sit around all day, haha". This is infuriating. No matter how healthy I am, whether I am a programmer or bycicle-courier, I'd have gotten my Diabetes anyway. Type I is one of these deseases that you can do absolutely nothing against, other then not passing on your faulty genes to children.
Edit: clarified the sentence where I am blamed for having Type I. Edit2: As pointed out below, Type II can be influenced by genetics too, made that more clear.
First, because there are a lot of professions one is not allowed to (this is different per country, obviously), but in general professions where you operate machines (pilot, truckdriver, sawmills etc) or which are physical (police, army, firefighters) and many more.
Which means that other, "Type I-friendly" professions get more Type I diabetics, obviously.
Sitting around all day in an office, is not particularly good for your Type I, but it's not dangerous either.
So, yes, there might be a correlation between certain professions and the amount of Type I diabetics they attract, but that is cause-and-effect turned around: not the profession causing the desease, but the desease preferring certain professions.
I've experienced the same thing. We really do need a new name for Type 1. There's some small amount of agitation for this, but it largely doesn't seem to have caught on. I usually just tell people the full name: "I'm a Type 1 diabetic." Usually they've never heard of the "type" system before, and ask for clarification.
A couple articles about the need for a new name:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/healt...
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-11-22/a-z/ct-met-dia... (I don't agree with the rudeness of some of the people quoted in this article, but it does drive the point home.)
> Type I is genetic. If you have the faulty genes, you get it. Regardless of lifestyle, health, country and whatnot.
It is not entirely genetic. It is an auto-immune disease that has a complex, and not fully understood trigger mechanism. That said, type I diabetics still do not have any control over it.
> Type I is binary: you have it or you don't.
Generally true, with the exception of the "Honeymoon Phase" in which new diabetics will still produce small amounts of insulin for a year or two after onset.
That said, I agree with the sentiment all the way.
Also, this statement is not correct. From OMIM on type 1:
"IDDM exhibits 30 to 50% concordance in monozygotic twins, suggesting that the disorder is dependent on environmental factors as well as genes. The average risk to sibs is 6% (Todd, 1990)."
There are other studies with similar conclusions. Having the "faulty" genes does not guarantee disease manifestation because the disease is multi-factorial.
... and completely ignoring the fact that "hepatitis" simply means liver inflammation, regardless of cause. So auto-immune hepatitis is totally accurate, and still, people think "virus" when they hear it.
"But what about when google sells your data to insurance companies, who then penalize diabetics for not maintaining specific glucose levels?'
"Do you really want google to know every single thing you put into your body?"
"Can we trust google to not put advertisements in the contact lens, making you watch a 15 second commercial before being able to read your gluose levels?"
Since the risks for ventures in this field have dropped significantly, devices such as this lens now have a much higher probability to actually see the light of day and not just be hidden in the archives, on thrown away napkins and spreadsheets.
Yes, Microsoft worked on it a few years back – yet seem to have dropped the ball or shifted their focus, I have also heard of such a project at Sanofi and research institutes around the world – yet a google X project may potentially be what this concept needs to make progress and actually have an impact. My sincere gratefulness to you guys at X for going at it!
Forgot to mention, like many others in this thread I am a type 1 diabetic since 30 years, so my gratitude goes a tad further than only thinking it's cool.
The timing is almost certainly because the project's secrecy had been recently compromised by the FDA revealing a meeting with the engineering team on its public calendar.
http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/1/10/5297216/google-x-team-m...
But then I realized: the alternative is to put a piece of hardware under your skin! It will be embeded in you "forever" and can only be removed via surgical procedures...
These contact lens, if ever available, will in fact revolutionize the diabetes scene and may open precedent to new "wearable" technologies targeting health.
Many things could contribute to this not being as revolutionary as it sounds. Everything from cost down to accuracy is a concern. Diabetics do like to have hope that this will be the game-changer but they've heard that many times before.
This link explains it better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6g581tJ7bM#t=10m15s
I believe the thermoelectric converter works by exploiting a temperature gradient, which I suspect would not be sufficient at this scale and location.
I dont care if i have to clockwork orange my eyelids, this sounds awesome
Obviously, a Google Glass or Oculus Rift equivalent but with contact lenses has to be one thing everyone's long thought of. But what about activating a contextual display by closing one eye briefly (a map or information about a person you're meeting), or seeing a definition of a word spoken in conversation by closing the other eye, or watching a movie with both eyes closed, reading a book the same way, getting song recognition data at any point, etc.
Could we see high-res displays worked into lenses so that they worked, were eventually cheap enough and able to operate in a "pass through" mode so they didn't other interrupt regular vision?
Are any companies working on it? Is it possible? What would be the key challenges?
1. Component size.
2. Power. The glucose monitor is similar to an RFID that can be powered by radio waves. Driving a screen or laser would require much more power. So you'd probably need some sort of inductive coil matched to regular eyewear.
3. Focus. You can't at that distance. So you'd probably have to beam an image directly onto the retina with a laser.
4. Occlusion of the pupil. Really hard to avoid this one. You might have to pair with a camera to add sight back as a feed. However there could be benefits with this too - eg. night vision
5. Health. Beaming power could be a cancer risk. Also contact lenses need to breath to prevent corneal neovascularization and other nasty effects of hypoxia. Modern contacts are gas permeable but adding electronics would hinder the flow.
Further down the line, technologies like this could be a great thing for the rest of us too. We all experience peaks and troughs in our blood glucose and in those troughs we often feel tired, without really knowing why. It would be great to be able to have continuous feedback like "your blood glucose spiked and now is low after you drank that bottle of lemonade an hour ago". Something like this would really help people to make better decisions and would be a great boon for general public health.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
With a google lens, they could even project adverts directly onto people's eyes.
So wait a minute, your eyes will start flashing when your glucose levels are spiking?
Maybe it can take enough energy from the ambient RFs. Maybe we will see a lot of people bringing their phones close to their faces from time to time, and people would be confused. "What are you doing with your phone, do you have an ear in your eye?"
If someone has contacts in the VC scene or is working in the VC scene and is interested please let me know.
(throw away account)
