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 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.
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