Google's smart contact lens granted patent

Google has been granted a patent by the U.S. patent office for its smart contact lens featuring a chip, electric circuit and sensor technology, according to multiple reports.

The search giant has previously said it is partnering with the pharmaceutical company Novartis to create a smart contact lens that could monitor blood sugar for people with diabetes. Google has been testing various prototypes of smart contact lens and is currently in talks with the FDA about a lens that measures glucose levels in users’ tears, according to an article in TIME. The company says the chip and sensor are embedded between two layers of contact lens material and a tiny pinhole lets tear fluid from the eye reach the glucose sensor, which can measure levels every second.

A patent report published at the time stated it was one of Google's many applications relating to "systems and/or methods for capturing image data representing a scene in a gaze of a viewer via a thin image capture component integrated on or within a contact lens, processing the image data, and employing the processed image data to perform functions locally on the contact lens or remotely on one or more remote devices."

The camera component can track and generate data of an image of a scene corresponding to the gaze of the wearer without obstructing the wearer's view, the report said.

Google had announced it was working on a contact lens for measuring and monitoring glucose at the start of 2014 with plans to make the contact lens available to consumers in 2019.