Millions of people worldwide live with type 1 diabetes, a chronic medical condition that requires constant, daily vigilance to maintain proper health. People who have type 1 diabetes must check their blood sugar (glucose) levels multiple times a day, which can be an unpleasant, painful process. Researchers at the University of Washington are developing a solution that would painlessly monitor glucose levels through tears rather than blood and provide feedback to the patient immediately, should a problem begin to develop.
Diabetes is a potentially devastating disease with no known cure. The pancreas of a person who has type 1 diabetes does not produce insulin. The failure to strike the right balance between food and insulin intake can lead to extreme physiological reactions—from crying jags to loss of consciousness. The long-term effects of uncontrolled blood glucose imbalances can be even more devastating.
Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Monitoring
Today, people with type 1 diabetes use needles to prick their fingers multiple times throughout the day, every day, including meal times, to collect blood samples that allow them to monitor and maintain healthy glucose levels, which is critical to reducing the impact that diabetes has on the patient’s health. The never-ending, daily blood draws are not only unpleasant for the person with diabetes, but they also provide limited information.
Researchers from the University of Washington (UW) and Microsoft Research Connections are working together to develop a non-invasive, technological solution that promises to improve both the health and overall quality of life for people who have diabetes: a contact lens that monitors blood glucose levels. This innovative solution represents a trend in technology called the natural user interface (NUI).
NUI technology can benefit the user without being obvious or intrusive. This has tremendous potential in the healthcare industry, where technology is a necessary, but not always pleasant, part of a patient’s diagnosis and care.
The contact lens NUI would replace the blood tests and provide real-time feedback regarding fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels to the wearer, allowing the user to react quickly—for example, by increasing insulin intake or eating a piece of candy to raise their blood sugar level. If such fluctuations are not detected by a blood draw, the person may experience physical symptoms including blurry vision, nausea, emotional instability, and loss of consciousness. Babak Parviz, a Researcher at the University of Washington, and Desney Tan, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, are developing the “functional lens,” a contact lens that would address all of these issues and more. As envisioned, the lens would be worn daily, just like regular contact lenses. But in addition to (or instead of) correcting vision, the lens would monitor the wearer’s glucose level through their tears.
“What is inside the blood, to a degree, appears on the surface of the eye,” Parviz explains. “So there is a reflection of the body chemistry directly on the surface of the eye. If you have a contact lens that can sample that surface, analyze it, and maybe send out the information through a radio, this contact lens, in principle, can give us information about what’s happening inside the body without actually going into the body or collecting a blood sample.”
The lens has the potential to help people like Kevin McFeely, who has lived with type 1 diabetes for three decades, and his two younger children, ages 10 and 7, who were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes three years ago.
A huge, shrimp-like marine creature that pursued its prey through the warm waters of the Earth’s Cambrian Period 515 million years ago had more acute vision than most of its diminutive modern-day relatives. This discovery, published in the international scientific journal Nature (vol. 480, pp. 237-240), gives a surprising new twist to the story of the evolution of complex eyes and the “family tree” of the creature itself - Anomalocaris.
An international team of palaeontologists led by Dr John Paterson from the University of New England in northern NSW discovered the fossilised eyes - the first Anomalocaris eyes with preserved lenses ever found - while excavating in the Emu Bay Shale on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island.
“Anomalocaris is the stuff of nightmares and science fiction films,” Dr Paterson said. “It is considered to have been at the top of the earliest food chains because of its metre-long body, the formidable grasping claws at the front of its head, and its circular mouth with teeth-like serrations. And this new discovery confirms that it had superb vision to support its predatory lifestyle.”
The eyes of Anomalocaris, until now known only by their outlines from other fossilised remains around the world, are oval-shaped, with the longer axis measuring 2-3 cm. This new discovery clearly shows the structure of the eye, which contained at least 16,000 hexagonal lenses arranged in a pattern of larger hexagons (”hexagonal packing”). “The number of lenses and other aspects of their optical design suggest that Anomalocaris would have seen its world with exceptional clarity while hunting in well-lit waters,” Dr Paterson said.
The compound eyes of Anomalocaris place it firmly on the “family tree” of the arthropods (along with modern-day spiders, scorpions, crabs, shrimps, lobsters and insects), an evolutionary relationship that was unclear before this discovery. Also, as the eyes date back to an early phase of the “Cambrian explosion” in animal evolution, and as there is no evidence of eyes of any kind in the pre-Cambrian fossil record, they provide evidence that complex eyes appeared unusually rapidly in evolutionary terms - “in the geological blink of an eye”, as Dr Paterson said. Among the arthropods, the visual acuity of Anomalocaris eyes is exceeded only in the dragonflies we share the world with today.
Dr Paterson and his team have published previous discoveries from the Emu Bay site of a different type of compound eye from an unknown arthropod. Their discovery published today (Paterson, J.R., García-Bellido, D.C., Lee, M.S.Y., Brock, G.A., Jago, J.B. & Edgecombe, G.D. “Acute vision in the giant Cambrian predator Anomalocaris and the origin of compound eyes”. Nature 480, 237-240) is the first time they have been able to positively identify the owner.
“The existence of highly visual hunters within Cambrian ecological communities would have influenced the ‘arms race’ that developed between predators and their prey during this important phase in early animal evolution more than 500 million years ago,” Dr Paterson said.
You thought Siri’s voice interface for the iPhone 4S was pretty slick? Wait until you see what the people behind Copenhagen-based project Senseye have planned – controlling your phone with your eyes. The team has developed technology that tracks the movement of your eyes using the front-facing camera on mobile phones. This then allows you to control all sorts of aspects of the phone. You will be able to send messages, play games and more without having to touch the handset at all. A developer interface will allow third-party apps to work with Senseye, and the plan is to earn revenue through licensing the technology to manufacturers so that it can be baked into the operating systems on handsets straight out of the box.
The technology is based on earlier work by the team, which resulted in an open source eye-tracking product called ITU Gaze Tracker, aimed at disabled people who may not be able to use conventional interfaces. Since that work at the IT University of Copenhagen, Senseye has taken part in Startup Bootcamp, where it worked on EyeProof, an eye tracking product for market research.
The mobile phone control product started as a prototype at Mobile Startup Weekend Copenhagen in June this year. Since then the project has won the ABB Award for Global Innovation and was first runner-up in the ICT championship at the Global Idea2Product competition in Sweden. The video below shows the technology running on an Android handset, being used to control a game.
Gok Wan has hosted UK’s first celebrity hangout at Google HQ, on behalf of Specsavers last week. The exclusive live event was hosted by Specsavers’ style guru last Friday 11th November at Google’s HQ offices in Central London. It was designed to raise awareness of the Spectacle Wearer of the Year (SWOTY) awards and to reinforce the association between Specsavers and Gok Wan in the social media space.
Gok Wan talked about looking great in specs as well as his Specsavers range, GW by Gok Wan. Tim Langlois, Specsavers digital marketing manager, said: ‘Gok Wan has been fronting the Spectacle Wearer of the Year awards since 2006, when he was named Best Newcomer. The awards have been running for 15 years now and we feel that the Google+ hangout is an amazing opportunity to take blogger and public engagement to a new, dynamic level.’ Hangouts are one of the main features in Google’s social network, allowing people the opportunity to run a group video chat that can host up to ten different users at one time. Additionally, the event has been streamed on Specsavers’ YouTube channel, enabling anyone to watch the event. Live status updates are also broadcasted to its 60,500 fans on Facebook.
eyesmart.com.au is now also on google+ and is the only B2B eyecare media company in Australia and New Zealand to have a presence at all relevant social channels: twitter, facebook, youtube, and recently google+.
Dr. Gregg Homer is an optometrists with a unique proposition for people with brown eyes, why not turn them blue? He says that he has been working on his procedure for more than a decade with results finally ready to be shared. He claims that his laser technology can make the switch without damaging vision or the eye's tissue.
The laser is “tuned to a specific frequency to remove the pigment from the surface of the iris,” Homer says. Underneath the brown layer of pigment that gets removed, everyone has blue eyes, he says. The procedure only lasts 20 seconds, but it takes two to three weeks for the eyes to lose the brown pigment tissue, which Homer says never grows back. The procedure—which is expected to run about US$5,000—should be available in about 18 months, he notes.
The secret of how birds zip flawlessly through narrow spaces without crashing into obstacles has been unlocked by Australian scientists. Their discovery could be used to design ‘bird-safe’ buildings and windmills, and improve the versatility of pilotless aircraft.
Researchers at The Vision Centre have found that birds weave rapidly and safely through dense forests and narrow corridors by using their eyes to sense the speed of background image flow on both sides and adjust their flight according to it.
“As animals travel forward, things that are close seem to speed by, and things that are farther away seem to travel more slowly,” says Professor Mandyam Srinivasan from The Vision Centre and The University of Queensland, whose team made the discovery. “It’s the same for birds. We found that they try to achieve a safe ‘balance’ by ensuring that the background images are passing at the same speed in both eyes. “This means that if the bird flies closer to obstacles on one side, the near eye will see things passing by faster while those seen by its other eye will pass more slowly. This imbalance prompts the bird to veer away to even out the speed of image flow in both eyes.”
To find out how birds navigate through narrow passages and away from danger, the research group trained budgerigars to fly along a corridor with walls lined with horizontal or vertical stripes, says Dr Partha Bhagavatula of The Vision Centre and The National Vision Research Institute. “We found that birds fly the fastest when both walls are lined horizontal stripes, because the stripes are parallel to the bird’s flight direction, and the birds don’t ‘see’ a strong image flow in the background,” Dr Bhagavatula says. “But when both walls have vertical stripes, birds slow down significantly due to the strong image motion, which shows that birds also regulate their flight speed according to what they see.”
When the walls were set up with different orientations – one with vertical and the other with horizontal stripes, the group found that birds flew significantly closer to the horizontal stripes. “As vertical stripes project a stronger image flow to their corresponding eye, they veer away to restore the balance between the flows experienced by their two eyes,” says Dr Bhagavatula. “This was also demonstrated when one wall was left completely blank. Then the birds flew very close to, and occasionally collided with, the blank side.”
Prof. Srinivasan says that flight behaviour in birds is very similar to insects such as honeybees, bumblebees and flies: “This suggests that this principle of visual guidance may be shared by all day-active flying animals. “Furthermore we believe these findings can contribute to the technology of guiding unmanned aerial vehicles where aircraft have to fly through obstacles in cluttered environments, or through canyons and gorges, or under bridges. “Another potential application is the design of urban structures that are more bird-friendly to minimise the risk of bird fatalities through collisions with window panes. We can also think about decorating windmill blades with patterns that generate motion signals to repel birds.”
The group’s paper “Optic flow cues guide flight in birds” by Partha Bhagavatula, Charles Claudianos, Michael Ibbotson and Mandyam Srinivasan has been published in the latest issue of Current Biology. Part of the research was carried out at the Research School of Biology at The Australian National University.
Millions of people worldwide live with type 1 diabetes, a chronic medical condition that requires constant, daily vigilance to maintain proper health. People who have type 1 diabetes must check their blood sugar (glucose) levels multiple times a day, which can be an unpleasant, painful process. Researchers at the University of Washington are developing a solution that would painlessly monitor glucose levels through tears rather than blood and provide feedback to the patient immediately, should a problem begin to develop.
A huge, shrimp-like marine creature that pursued its prey through the warm waters of the Earth’s Cambrian Period 515 million years ago had more acute vision than most of its diminutive modern-day relatives. This discovery, published in the international scientific journal Nature (vol. 480, pp. 237-240), gives a surprising new twist to the story of the evolution of complex eyes and the “family tree” of the creature itself - Anomalocaris.
You thought Siri’s voice interface for the iPhone 4S was pretty slick? Wait until you see what the people behind Copenhagen-based project Senseye have planned – controlling your phone with your eyes. The team has developed technology that tracks the movement of your eyes using the front-facing camera on mobile phones. This then allows you to control all sorts of aspects of the phone. You will be able to send messages, play games and more without having to touch the handset at all. A developer interface will allow third-party apps to work with 
Gok Wan has hosted UK’s first celebrity hangout at Google HQ, on behalf of Specsavers last week. The exclusive live event was hosted by Specsavers’ style guru last Friday 11th November at Google’s HQ offices in Central London. It was designed to raise awareness of the Spectacle Wearer of the Year (SWOTY) awards and to reinforce the association between Specsavers and Gok Wan in the social media space.
Dr. Gregg Homer is an optometrists with a unique proposition for people with brown eyes, why not turn them blue? He says that he has been working on his procedure for more than a decade with results finally ready to be shared. He claims that his laser technology can make the switch without damaging vision or the eye's tissue.
The secret of how birds zip flawlessly through narrow spaces without crashing into obstacles has been unlocked by Australian scientists. Their discovery could be used to design ‘bird-safe’ buildings and windmills, and improve the versatility of pilotless aircraft.