Google has put on display a prototype of a contact lens that could be used by diabetics to monitor their disease.
The lens contains a miniaturized glucose sensor and wireless chip. The lens would continually monitor glucose levels in tears and report the information to a computer or smartphone.
Google says the lens will be a lot less intrusive for measuring glucose levels than pricking fingers for blood tests.
“We wondered if miniaturized electronics — think chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair — might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy,” Google said in its press release. “We hope a tiny, super sensitive glucose sensor embedded in a contact lens could be the first step in showing how to measure glucose through tears, which in the past has only been theoretically possible.”
The unit is reportedly powered by radio waves.
Google executives have said the search giant will block searches for child pornography.
In addition, the company says they have been reporting to authorities anyone they find who has been posting pictures of child sexual abuse to the web. The evidence handed over by Google has been used in multiple convictions of abusers.
The changes to Google’s search algorithm are also being applied to 150 different languages in an attempt to combat the sharing of child pornography worldwide. The company is also putting warnings at the top of pages where people search for illegal images that the images violate international law and advice on where to seek help.
Engineers at YouTube are also working on a system that will automatically identify videos with children being abused so they can be immediately flagged by the search engine.
In addition, Google is funding internships at both the Internet Watch Foundation and the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to help those groups track down child abusers.