Soon, Contact Lenses May Be Able To Measure Blood Sugar Level And Even Detect Cancer

Researchers in the US are working on a technology that will, in the future, enable your contact lenses to do more than just help you see.

An artist's rendition of the transparent biosensors in contact lenses - Jack Forkey/Oregon State University

A team of scientists from the Oregon State University are developing contact lenses with embedded transparent sensors that could monitor things like your glucose levels, blood toxicity (for drug testing) and even detect early signs of cancer.

¡°My group had been working on a different technology for glucose sensing, which is similar to what is used for glucose test strips,¡± Greg Herman, a chemical engineer and lead researcher on the project told told Digital Trends. ¡°On a separate project, we were working on transistors that can be transparent. It came to me that we could modify the transistor to be a sensor and make it fully transparent.¡± From there, actually combining the two was easy he added.

Herman and his team used a chemically manufactured compound, Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide, which he helped develop years ago. It¡¯s widely used in smartphone manufacturing to improve touchscreen sensitivity.

IGZO is capable of carrying an enzyme that reacts with glucose to change the conductivity of a contact lens, thus allowing it to measure the wearer¡¯s blood sugar level. The research could improve home testing for diabetic patients, as it can be embedded in contact lenses that don¡¯t have a magnifying power, allowing them to monitor their glucose on the go.

In fact, Herman says over 2,500 various biosensors can be embedded into a 1 millimetre square of the lenses, capable of detecting things like uric acid levels and even cancer markers. Unfortunately, such sensors are years away from being cheap enough to economically embed into commercially sold contacts.