Google Glass Helps Researchers Develop 'Organs on Chips'

Using Google Glass, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Massachusetts, US, have collected promising results as part of a technology known as "organs-on-chips". Google Glass offers researchers a hands-free and flexible monitoring system, and enables them to give voice commands.

The team first developed hardware and software to remotely monitor and control devices that mimic the human physiological system. These devices, known as organs-on-chips, allow researchers to test drug compounds and predict physiological responses with high accuracy in a laboratory setting.

But monitoring the results of such experiments from a conventional desktop computer has several limitations, especially when results must be monitored over the course of hours, days or even weeks.

To make Google Glass work for their purposes, lead researcher Shrike Zhang and colleagues developed hardware and software that takes advantage of voice control command of Google Glass and other features in order to not only monitor but also remotely control their liver- and heart-on-a-chip systems.

Using valves remotely activated by the Glass, the team introduced pharmaceutical compounds on liver organoids and collected the results.

"We believe such a platform has widespread applications in biomedicine and may be further expanded to health care settings where remote monitoring and control could make things safer and more efficient," said senior author Ali Khademhosseini, director of the Biomaterials Innovation Research Center at BWH, in a paper appeared in the journal Scientific Reports.

"This may be of particular importance in cases where experimental conditions threaten human life - such as work involving highly pathogenic bacteria or viruses or radioactive compounds," added Zhang.