[智能隐形眼镜]
Google unveiled Thursday a contact lens that monitors glucose levels in tears, a potential reprieve for millions of diabetics who have to jab their fingers to draw their own blood as many as 10 times a day.
谷歌周四公布了隐形眼镜,通过眼泪来监测血糖水平,可以缓解数以百万计的糖尿病患者每天都得针刺自己的手指取10次血的现状。
The prototype, which Google says will take at least five years to reach consumers, is one of several medical devices being designed by companies to make glucose monitoring for diabetic patients more convenient and less invasive than the traditional finger pricks.
从实验原型到市场推广普及，谷歌标志至少要五年时间。它是小型医疗设备之一，将会比针刺的手指的方式更方便。
The lenses use a minuscule glucose sensor and a wireless transmitter to help those among the world’s 382 million diabetics who need insulin keep a close watch on their blood sugar and adjust their dose.
该镜头使用一个微小的葡萄糖传感器和无线发射器，以帮助那些全球3.82亿的糖尿病患者，他们需要胰岛素保持密切关注自己的血糖，并调整其剂量。
[血糖监测智能眼镜]
The contact lenses were developed during the past 18 months in the clandestine Google X lab that also came up with a driverless car, Google’s Web-surfing eyeglasses (Google Glass) and Project Loon, a network of large balloons designed to beam the Internet to unwired places.
But research on the contact lenses began several years earlier at the University of Washington, where scientists worked under National Science Foundation funding.
"You can take it to a certain level in an academic setting, but at Google we were given the latitude to invest in this project," said one of the lead researchers, Brian Otis. "The beautiful thing is we’re leveraging all of the innovation in the semiconductor industry that was aimed at making cellphones smaller and more powerful."
American Diabetes Association board chair Dwight Holing said he’s gratified that creative scientists are searching for solutions for people with diabetes but warned that the device must provide accurate and timely information.
"People with diabetes base very important health care decisions on the data we get from our monitors," he said.
The device looked like a typical contact lens when Otis held one on his index finger. On closer examination, sandwiched in the lens are two twinkling glitter-specks loaded with tens of thousands of miniaturized transistors. It’s ringed with a hair-thin antenna.
"It doesn’t look like much, but it was a crazy amount of work to get everything so very small," Otis said at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters. It took years of soldering hair-thin wires to miniaturize electronics, essentially building tiny chips from scratch, to make what Otis said is the smallest wireless glucose sensor ever made.
Other non-needle glucose monitoring systems are also in the works, including a similar contact lens by Netherlands-based NovioSense, a minuscule, flexible spring that is tucked under an eyelid. Israel-based OrSense has already tested a thumb cuff, and there have been early designs for tattoos and saliva sensors.
A wristwatch monitor was approved by the FDA in 2001, but patients said the low level electric currents pulling fluid from their skin was painful, and it was buggy.
"There are a lot of people who have big promises," said Dr. Christopher Wilson, CEO of NovioSense. "It’s just a question of who gets to market with something that really works first."
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原文网址：http://www.veling.cn/post/GoogleIsTestingSmartContactLens.html