Google has upped the ante on its contact lens project, now patenting a lens that will be solar-powered to monitor and collect information about your health.
As reported by Business Insider, Google’s new solar-powered lens will collect biological data from its user and send it to computers.
The new lens will have a lot more functionality than the Google lens announced in 2014, which were designed to monitor glucose levels in diabetics to better help them control fluctuations and eliminate the need for needles.
That project, as we reported, started at the University of Washington by a grad student who built the prototype. She later moved on to work at Google.
That UW project also got a boost from Microsoft. “That earlier incarnation of the project, funded by the National Science Foundation, received support and collaboration from none other than Microsoft, as announced in this blog post from the Redmond company two years ago.”
The patent for the new and improved Google contact lens says that it will be able to track a lot more, including temperature, blood-alcohol content, allergens and air pollution, and it can potentially be used as an authentication code to I.D. people, according to Business Insider.
Of course, Google is also working on a health band that will send all your data directly to to your doctor.
While it’s great to monitor your health and all, we can’t help but wonder: Who else will have access to this data? Just thinking about big insurance companies tracking your every move — or pizza binge — is enough to cause concern.
