A week ago Google introduced their smart contact lens project.

Google wrote on its blog in a post which has over 5800 comments:

We’re now testing a smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material. We’re testing prototypes that can generate a reading once per second. We’re also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we’re exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds. It’s still early days for this technology, but we’ve completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype. We hope this could someday lead to a new way for people with diabetes to manage their disease.

We’re in discussions with the FDA, but there’s still a lot more work to do to turn this technology into a system that people can use. We’re not going to do this alone: we plan to look for partners who are experts in bringing products like this to market. These partners will use our technology for a smart contact lens and develop apps that would make the measurements available to the wearer and their doctor. We’ve always said that we’d seek out projects that seem a bit speculative or strange, and at a time when the International Diabetes Federation (PDF) is declaring that the world is “losing the battle” against diabetes, we thought this project was worth a shot.

We take a look at who owns the category defining domains in the space.

SmartContactLens.com is owned by a gentleman in Michigan, he had regged the domain on 10/6/09. The domain had previously been registered by a lady who owned it for one year and then let it drop.

SmartContactLens.com forwards to a site called MedicalMile.com. Medical Mile seems to be going through a redevelopment with links to varies articles about smart contact lens stories.

The owner of SmartContactLens also owns SmartContactLenses.com he has owned that since April of 2009. That name has been previously dropped by three different registrants.

SmartLens.net/org/ca/co.uk/.co/.de are all registered and mostly just parked no development on any extension.

There is another product mentioned on the Medical Mile website that deals with a smart contact lens. They are out of Switzerland and for our readers who specialize in European cctlds the .ch extension is available, .be is registered.

Here is the Google video on their project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGhGZYX5P1w