For diabetics, monitoring blood glucose can be inconvenient and even painful, requiring them to regularly draw blood in order to test. Can’t there be an easier way? There is now! New contact lenses that incorporate nanotechnology can actually measure the glucose contained in tears, and will change color based on whether your blood sugar is high or low:
Nanoparticles — is there anything they can’t do? — embedded in the hydrogel lenses react with glucose molecules in naturally occurring tears. A chemical reaction then causes the lenses to shift their hues, alerting the wearer to falling or spiking blood sugar levels. The wearer can then make the appropriate adjustments to his or her blood sugar, all without having to carry around (and use) devices for drawing and analyzing blood.
If these gain in popularity, I’d expect people with diabetes to start getting comments from friends and family like, “Hey, your eyes are brown – do you need something to eat?” Beats pricking your fingertips to obtain drops of blood, for sure.
As a RN CDE and someone living with Type1 over 36 years, this sounds amazing!. For Type 2, this will make life easier and start prevention (of the nasty stuff) and good self-management earlier. People living with Type 1 can use this for early hypo alerts and alert you to check and correct earlier before ketones occur. We will however have to capillary check at least to go with carb counting. I don’t think it would be wise to dose your insulin according to green, red or purple
Just sayin’.
Good luck getting it thru Health Canada….the strip suppliers aren’t going to like it. These contacts, if kept to a reasonable cost, will cause a noticeable dip in the demand aspect, which will cause a decrease in supply need…..
A difficult task awaits you but thank you for the excellent effort on this and type if you need a hand.