A low-power, multiroom sensor network watches for drips and runs on a coin-cell battery.

By Kate Greene

Earlier this month, as Google was snatching up the smart-thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion, a lesser known home sensor company made its own announcement. SNUPI Technologies, a Seattle startup, said it had garnered $7.5 million in funding. That might be pocket change compared to the Nest deal, but it was a significant endorsement just ahead of SNUPI’s first product launch: a low-power wireless sensor network called WallyHome that tracks humidity, water leaks, and temperature throughout a building.

There are already many home monitors on the market; some, such as Lowe’s Iris Home Management System and a water leak and flood sensor from General Electric, are even wirelessly networked. What makes WallyHome novel is its use of a low-power communication scheme that lets sensors send data back to an Internet-connected base station over significant distances and through obstructions like walls and floors while sipping power from a coin-cell battery.

SNUPI cofounder Gabe Cohn believes this long-distance, low-power approach will endear the product to homeowners who want a reliable sensor network that requires little maintenance and can be installed easily. The base station plugs into a wall outlet and an Internet router via an Ethernet cable. Six wireless sensors are placed in leak- or humidity-prone areas, such as behind a toilet, under a dishwasher, or near a sump pump. And each sensor’s battery should power the device for up to 10 years without a replacement, Cohn says.

Most sensor networks rely on wireless protocols like Wi-Fi, ZigBee, or Bluetooth to send a signal to a base station tens of feet away. Some of these networks require devices that boost a wireless signal so it can go around walls or through floors, and they tend to require multiple battery replacements during their lifetimes.

Instead of blasting a wireless signal tens of feet, the WallyHome sensors emit a relatively weak wireless signal. While the signal isn’t powerful enough to reach a base station on its own, it can reach inside walls and resonate with the copper wiring that carries electricity. WallyHome effectively turns these internal power lines into antennas, propagating sensor data to a base station, which is plugged into the same lines. Data is then uploaded to a cloud-based data collection and analysis service, and a person can check the status of a sensor using the Web and a smartphone app. The system sends a text, e-mail, or mobile phone alert if water is detected or temperature and humidity thresholds are exceeded. “You have these wireless sensor nodes you can place anywhere in the house or building because power lines go anywhere,” says Cohn.

The concept of using power lines to augment wireless sensor networks arose from research conducted by Cohn and co-inventors Matt Reynolds and Shwetak Patel, both professors at the University of Washington. In addition to cofounding SNUPI (Sensor Network Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure) in 2012, Patel, who was one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2009, also cofounded Zensi, acquired by Belkin in 2010. Patel was awarded a MacArthur award in 2011.

Elizabeth Mead, an analyst at IHS, a research firm, says that energy management is crucial for home networks. Low-power devices are becoming increasingly important, especially as the number of sensors in home networks proliferate.

Cohn hopes WallyHome’s water-watching network will appeal to people who might have a second home that isn’t regularly occupied, or who have previously experienced water damage, which can cause thousands of dollars of damage.

Over time, the system, which runs sensor data through machine-learning algorithms, will eventually be able to infer trends and anticipate changes in the environment, Cohn says. It could, for instance, notice that leaks from frozen pipes are common in certain areas at certain times of the year and issue warnings to customers.

As smart-home technologies ramp up, there’s interest in ensuring interoperability between devices from various vendors (see “CES 2014: Smart Homes Open Their Doors”). Cohn says the WallyHome cloud and mobile device software will be interoperable with existing smart-home products. He adds that future WallyHome sensors will be able to track air quality, monitoring pollen, smoke, and dust.

Zimperium believes its machine-learning approach to mobile security can outwit hackers.

By Rachel Metz

A mobile security startup is launching software that learns how your smartphone behaves in order to better spot and stop new security threats before they can cause harm or spread to other handsets.

Today, San Francisco-based Zimperium unveiled its zIPS Android app (the “IPS” stands for “intrusion prevention system”), which the company says uses machine learning to watch how your smartphone normally acts and can spot strange changes in its usage, enabling it to detect and prevent attacks, including those that may strike via unprotected Wi-Fi networks. This kind of technique has long been used to spot malware on PCs, but it becomes trickier on smartphones, which can be exposed to ever-growing and changing security issues across different wireless networks.

While the zIPS app is geared toward companies that would deploy the software on employees’ phones and use new companion software called zConsole to manage all the handsets, Zimperium expects to roll out a consumer version in the future, and will perhaps eventually bring zIPS to other devices.

Long combated on computers, malware has begun to hit smartphones, too, as they become a popular (and for some people, predominant) way to get online. Since Android smartphones make up the majority of the market, they’re most affected so far: A recent report from F-Secure found 259 new security threats and variations on existing threats in the third quarter of 2013, 252 of which were focused on Android. According to a Juniper Research report, though, 80 percent of business and personal handsets are still unprotected.

The zIPS software works whether the user is on or offline, says Zimperium CEO and founder Itzhak Avraham, and can protect against malicious apps, such as those that can self-modify, as well as various types of network attacks, like a “man in the middle” attack where a hacker intercepts data being sent between two parties.

Avraham, who previously served as a security researcher for the Israeli Defense Forces and as a white-hat hacker for Samsung, showed me a demo of zIPS in action during a video chat over Skype. Holding two Android Samsung smartphones, he used one to attack the zIPS-running handset, which glowed with a green image meant to look like a radar screen. When Avraham performed a man-in-the-middle attack, a notification popped up on the zIPS display saying that a threat was just spotted and prevented. It also presented information on the type of threat (“MITM” in this case) and the IP address of the attacking device.

Avraham says that attacks such as these aren’t generally spotted by mobile antivirus apps because those apps tend to be designed just to look for incoming file signatures that can be compared with known bad code. “If I download an app, for instance, even if the app itself is benign at that moment in time, I can later download an update that has malicious intent to run outside of the sandbox that the [antivirus] product has access to,” he says.

The zIPS app is trained to recognize such attacks by using existing malware and known attack techniques. This is doable, Avraham says, because while there are tons of different attacks, there are just a few dozen different techniques.

Zimperium, which counts famed hacker-turned-security-researcher Kevin Mitnick among its advisors, hopes its software can eventually be used to prevent hacking on everything from smart TVs to refrigerators, as they are becoming increasingly common in homes (see “CES 2014: Smart Homes Open Their Doors”). Many security experts expect the so-called Internet of things to become a big target for hackers since protections on such devices are typically weak, the devices tend to be plugged in at all times, and it may not be as easy to determine if suspicious activity is taking place as it is on a smartphone or computer.

Internet-connected devices are already gaining some unwelcome attention: between late December and early January, one security software company, Proofpoint, noticed an attack in which hundreds of thousands of malicious e-mails were sent by over 100,000 Internet-connected consumer gadgets, including routers, TVs, and at least one fridge.

BY EDWIN CHAN

(Reuters) – Activist investor Carl Icahn picked up another $500 million of Apple Inc shares on Thursday to take his investment in the iPhone maker to $3.6 billion, while ratcheting up his months-long campaign to pry open the company’s cash hoard.

Icahn, who repeatedly has called Apple a “no brainer” even as he wages a campaign to get it to return more cash to shareholders, tweeted his latest move just a day after revealing a position of over $3 billion in the company.

In a lengthy letter to shareholders filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, Icahn urged shareholders to vote “yea” to his proposal for a new $50 billion buyback, and laid out familiar arguments as to why Apple should share more of its $146 billion cash hoard.

Apple’s strong market position in smartphones and tablets does not justify the company’s official stance that it needed to maintain reserves to compete in a fast-evolving consumer electronics industry, Icahn said.

He said the stock’s price-to-earnings multiple stood 71 percent below the S&P 500’s and that the shares could be worth $840 if that gap was closed. An expansion of its capital return program could help bridge that difference, while allowing the company to express confidence in its own stock.

“Even if the story ended with Apple’s existing product and software lines, we would still choose to make Apple our largest investment,” Icahn said in the letter.

“But there is more to the story! (CEO) Tim Cook keeps saying that he expects to introduce ‘new products in new categories’ and yet very few people seem to be listening.”

Apple on Thursday referred back to its December proxy statement, in which it urged shareholders to vote down Icahn’s proposal, warning that it needed ready access to cash in a fast-evolving and competitive mobile devices industry. Arch-foe Samsung Electronics has grabbed market share from Apple in past years while a host of smaller rivals like Huawei are aggressively competing in emerging markets.

Shares of Apple closed up 0.8 percent at $556.18.

NO BACKING DOWN

Icahn, known for decades of strong-arm tactics including proxy fights against major corporations, appears to be stepping up efforts in the technology realm.

On Wednesday, eBay Inc disclosed that Icahn had taken a 0.82 percent stake in the company and was pressing for a spinoff of PayPal, the ecommerce giant’s fastest-growing and most profitable division.

On Thursday, he set his sights again on Apple, accusing its board of lacking investment management experience.

It was unclear when or how much stock the activist investor, who in August began trying to get Cook to agree to a $150 billion buyback, now holds. In a letter to Cook made public on October 24, Icahn said he had increased his stake to 4.7 million shares.

Apple’s stock has surged 17 percent since Icahn first disclosed a significant stake in the company on August 13, when the shares were trading below $500. An additional $500 million investment on Thursday would translate into roughly 900,000 shares at current levels.

Apple is in the midst of returning $100 billion to shareholders, including a total share repurchase program of $60 billion. It said it had already returned $43 billion in dividends and repurchases.

But more could be done, Icahn argued.

“Given this massive net cash position and robust earnings generation, Apple is perhaps the most overcapitalized company in corporate history,” Icahn said in his letter.

BY TOM HALS

(Reuters) – Opening statements began on Thursday in patentowner Intellectual Ventures’ trial against Google’s Motorola Mobility unit in a lawsuit that could be a bellwether on public opinion toward intellectual property.

Intellectual Ventures (IV) claims that Motorola infringed on three patents covering a variety of smartphone-related technologies, including Google Play. Motorola has countered that the patents are not valid because the technology is already well-known to those within the industry, and that IV uses its patents to sue others rather than to innovate.

Motorola, which developed the equipment used to broadcast Neil Armstrong’s moon landing in 1969, reminded jurors of its history of building technology. Motorola attorney William Boice played a recording of Armstrong’s “one small step for man” quote in court.

“There’s no building at Intellectual Ventures,” said Boice. “They are in the business of bringing lawsuits.”

To counter those claims, Intellectual Ventures’ attorney Elizabeth Day urged the jury to focus on the inventors behind the patents. One of those patents, which covers detachable handset technology, was issued in 2006 to Rajendra Kumar and acquired by IV in 2011.

“Motorola will try to tell you the man who loved to invent didn’t invent anything,” she said of Kumar.

The trial pits two adversaries in the current debate in Congress over patent reform. Google, which acquired Motorola in 2012, is backing attempts to curb software patents and make it easier to fight lawsuits. IV has warned that Congress should not act too rashly to weaken patent owners’ rights.

Privately held Intellectual Ventures and other patent buyers have been criticized by some in the technology industry for burdening innovation by using the patents they buy to pursue lawsuits instead of building products.

IV argues that unlike some of the firms denounced as “patent trolls,” it invests only in quality intellectual property and does not file frivolous lawsuits. The multi-billion dollar patent firm has other lawsuits in pre-trial stages and has agreed to settlements for other, separate claims, but the Motorola lawsuit is the first case it has taken to trial since IV was founded 14 years ago.

The trial is expected to last about eight days. If Intellectual Ventures prevails, damages will be assessed in separate proceeding.

The case in U.S. District Court, District of Delaware is Intellectual Ventures I and Intellectual Ventures II vs. Motorola Mobility, 11-908.

REUTERS/SIPHIWE SIBEKO

(Reuters) – Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, the world’s biggest smartphone maker, said on Friday it planned to lower its mobile marketing spend this year relative to revenue, after big promotional spending hit fourth-quarter profit.

“We’ll actively leverage global sports events such as the Sochi (Winter) Olympics and ourretail channels… but we will try to raise the efficiency of our marketing spend and lower our overall mobile marketing budget to revenue this year compared with last year,” Senior Vice President Kim Hyunjoon told analysts after the company released its earnings.

BY PAUL CARSTEN AND SOHAM CHATTERJEE

(Reuters) – Chinese PC maker Lenovo Group Ltd has agreed to buy International Business Machine Corp’s low-end server business for $2.3 billion in what would be China’s biggest technology deal.

The long-expected acquisition comes nearly a decade after Lenovo bought IBM’s money-losing ThinkPad business for $1.75 billion, eventually becoming the world leader in personalcomputers in 2012.

The sale of the low-end server operation – which still needs U.S. government approval – would allow IBM to focus on its decade-long shift to more profitable software and services.

The deal would increase Lenovo’s share in the server market to 14 percent from 2 percent, said Peter Hortensius, a senior vice-president at Lenovo.

The deal needs clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which protects U.S. national security.

Chinese companies faced the most scrutiny over their U.S. acquisitions in 2012, according to a CFIUS report issued in December.

Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s notebook division faced scrutiny before approval, and this time will be easier, analysts said.

“It’s fair to say that this deal is more likely to get through CFIUS without major problems than the 2005 transaction,” said John Reynolds, a partner at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell in Washington, D.C. who has handled CFIUS issues for 20 years.

Reynolds saw relatively little national security risk in the deal, noting that Lenovo was well-known in the United States.

Maybank Kim Eng analyst Warren Lau noted that the System X server, among the systems to be bought by Lenovo, is based on commoditized technology and components from the United States.

This deal is likely also to win U.S. antitrust approval, perhaps within weeks, said Jonathan Lewis, an antitrust partner with Baker & Hostetler LLP. “Given that Lenovo is likely to take advantage of its lower-cost manufacturing base in China, this deal is likely to be viewed as pro-competitive.”

IBM shares edged 0.2 percent lower to $182.27 at mid-afternoon Thursday. Trading in Lenovo shares was halted before the close in Hong Kong ahead of the announcement.

SEVEN QUARTERS OF LOSSES

The deal with Lenovo marks another step in IBM’s switch away from hardware to softwareand services. IBM said this month it would spend more than $1.2 billion to build up to 15 data centers on five continents to expand its cloud services and reach new clients andmarkets.

The company also said it would invest more than $1 billion to establish a new business unit for Watson – the supercomputer system that beat humans on the TV quiz show “Jeopardy” – to offer cloud services to businesses and consumers.

With Lenovo’s PC business under siege from powerful smartphones and super-fast tablets, the company is remodeling itself as a force in mobile devices and data storage servers.

It would not be easy for Lenovo turn around the server unit, however. IBM’s low-margin server business has posted seven quarters of losses as clients move to the cloud.

“To generate costs synergy, Lenovo will need to move most of the manufacturing from IBM’s existing facility in Virginia to Asia while keeping some R&D in the U.S.,” Lau said.

The server business being sold by IBM, which produced low-cost x86 servers, competes withHewlett-Packard Co and Dell but lags both in market share.

IBM dominates the higher-end server market with a 57 percent share, according to research firm Canalys. IBM will retain its higher-margin server systems and continue to develop software and applications for the x86 platform.

Following closure of the deal, Lenovo will offer jobs to 7,500 IBM employees and assume customer service and maintenance operations.

“We will do a variety of things – improve products, drive improved costs, and couple it with the scale we have and our PC business to improve go-to-market,” said Lenovo’s Hortensius.

Analysts said Lenovo would likely find it easier than IBM to sell the x86 servers to Chinese companies as Beijing tries to localize its IT purchases in the wake of revelations about widespread U.S. electronic snooping.

BIGGEST TECH DEAL

Lenovo said it expected demand for computing power and recovery of global enterprise spending to further drive growth in the x86 server market.

Lenovo has agreed to pay $2.07 billion in cash and the rest with stock of the Hong Kong-listed PC maker.

The deal surpasses Baidu Inc’s $1.85 billion acquisition of 91 Wireless from NetDragon Websoft Inc last year, according to Thomson Reuters data, and underscores the clout of China’s technology firms as they expand overseas.

The unit posted a loss of $26.4 million after tax for the 12 months ended December 31, compared with a profit of $187 million in the 12 months ended March 2013. The x86 unit has annual revenue of $4.6 billion.

Talks between IBM and Lenovo fell apart last year due to differences over pricing, with media reports at the time suggesting IBM wanted as much as $6 billion for the unit.

Analysts said the sale may have been accelerated by IBM’s problems in China following revelations of U.S. electronic spying and ongoing weakness in hardware sales.

The world’s biggest technology services company posted a 23 percent drop in fourth-quarter revenue from China.

Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s PC business in 2005 became the springboard for its leap to the top of global PC maker rankings, and the market is betting Lenovo will enjoy similar success with its latest acquisition, which is partly reflected in a 9.44 percent rise in its shares this year. The Hang Seng stock index is down 2.5 percent in the same period.

IBM’s server business is the world’s second-largest, with a 22.9 percent share of the $12.3 billion market in the third quarter of 2013, according to technology research firm Gartner.

Hewlett-Packard is the biggest player, while Lenovo does not appear in the top five.

Lenovo said it was advised by Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs Group.

Google looks set to bring its smart, personal data-fueled assistant, Google Now, to the Chrome browser.

Google’s smart but personality-free assistant Google Now (see “Google’s Answer to Siri”) is embedded in the latest preview, or “Canary”, version of the company’s Chrome browser. That means that people who use Google Now on their smartphone and, via Chrome, on a Windows or Mac computer, will be informed via a desktop notification about things such as flight delays and sports scores. Google Now chooses those “cards” based on what Google knows from a person’s Gmail account, Web search history and the location of their mobile device.

When I installed Chrome Canary on my Windows-running laptop and signed in to my Google account, I saw two cards, one showing the local weather (based on my computer’s location) and another telling me that a package had shipped (gleaned from my email inbox). I didn’t see it happen, but it seems that when new cards appear in that list–for example, to say that your flight is delayed–a Windows notification will pop up to let you know.

Presumably, Google Now is slated to be added to the main Chrome browser, which is estimated by Statcounter to have a 46 percent share of the desktop browsers in use worldwide. Its appearance is a reminder that Google is willing to explore what it can do by drawing together its disparate sources of data on its users’ lives. Some of the data used by Google Now could conceivably also help the smart home devices made by the company’s recent acquisition Nest (see “Nest’s Future Is Like Apple and Google Collaborating”).

Perhaps increasing its availability will also make Google Now seem more essential. My experience with Google Now on my Android smartphone has been one of increasing indifference; I mostly don’t check the list of cards at all anymore, even though they are generally well-chosen. The app occasionally pushes a notification at me that it thinks is important, though, such as when it told me last week that a flight I was booked onto was delayed by several hours. In that case, I was glad Google Now was looking out for me, since I was unlikely to have checked my flight status manually or seen the email from the airline for some hours.

Harvard Bioscience spin-off is stepping up its production of synthetic tracheas to supply clinical trials.

Since 2008, eight patients have been given a new chance at life when surgeons replaced their badly damaged tracheas with man-made versions. This highly experimental technology is now moving from research labs to a manufacturing facility as a Boston-area company prepares to produce the scaffolds for growing the synthetic organs on a large scale.

Harvard Apparatus Regenerative Technology, or HART, is testing its synthetic trachea system in Russia and has plans for similar tests in the European Union this year. The company is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to set up a trial in the United States as well.

The synthetic windpipes are made by growing a patient’s own stem cells on a lab-made scaffold. In the future, this technique could be adapted to create other organs, such as a replacement esophagus, heart valve, or kidney.

If expanded into more body parts, the synthetic organ technology could help meet a dire medical need. Transplant waiting lists for vital organs such as hearts, lungs, livers, and kidneys are distressingly long. Every day, patients die waiting for donor organs. In the U.S. alone, 120,000 people are on waiting lists for an organ, estimates the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And waiting lists underestimate the true need, says Joseph Vacanti, a surgeon-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a leader in tissue-engineering research. “The only way we are going to meet that real need is to manufacture living organs,” says Vacanti, who is not affiliated with HART.

Researchers around the globe are finding new ways to create tissues for transplantation. “Over 25 years, the field has gone from fiction and fantasy to science and engineering,” says Vacanti. There are many different approaches, from precise ink-jet printing of cell types into an organized structure (see “Printed Eye Cells Could Help Treat Blindness”) to letting cells spontaneously self-organize into proto-organs (see “A Rudimentary Liver Is Grown from Stem Cells” and “Growing Eyeballs”).

HART’s current approach is to grow a patient’s stem cells on synthetic scaffolds. The four most recent artificial trachea surgeries have been done with these lab-made scaffolds, says David Green, CEO of HART.

Growing a patient’s own cells on a scaffold provides a good environment for bone marrow stem cells that can then develop into various cell types both in the incubator and after they are implanted into a patient.

HART creates the scaffolds by spinning fibers about a hundredth of the width of a human hair into a tube that is made to fit each patient. The result is a customized scaffold “that makes a mesh that’s the right size for the cells,” says Green. “They feel at home there.”

Stem cells taken from a patient’s bone marrow are then “rained down over the top of the scaffold, much like a chicken in a rotisserie,” says Green. The cells grow on the scaffolds in a specialized rotating incubator for about two days before they are transplanted. About five days after the transplant, new cell types appear on the organ, he says, including important cells that line the inner surface and help move mucous from the lungs by coughing. Eventually, blood vessels grow into the synthetic organ, says Green.

By delivering gene therapies to patients before they go blind, doctors may be able to prevent the loss of many important light-detecting cells.

A new kind of gene therapy has reversed some vision loss in people born with a degenerative eye disease for which there is no existing treatment.

In a first for the field, the treatment can be given to some participants who still had 20/20 vision, albeit in a limited field of vision. By delivering gene therapy at an earlier stage, researchers hope to save more light-sensing cells in the retina.

“We need to push gene therapy forward, to apply it before vision is gone,” says Robert MacLaren, an ophthalmologist at the University of Oxford who led the study. “When retinal damage gets to a certain point, it’s beyond repair.”

MacLaren says earlier treatment could also be particularly important for conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.

The surgical procedure employed put the precious remaining vision of patients in the trial at risk because it involved detaching delicate retina tissue in one of each participant’s eyes, but so far no problems have occurred since that surgery, the researchers report. Some participants report that they’re now able to detect more light, read more letters and numbers, and even see the stars at night. One patient, who before his treatment could not read any lines on an eye chart with his most affected eye, was able to read three lines with that eye following his treatment.

The condition addressed in the work is choroideremia, an eye disease that affects an estimated one in every 50,000 people. Because the gene that causes this disease is on the X chromosome, it primarily affects males. Starting in late childhood usually, the condition causes progressive narrowing or tunneling of vision and often ends in blindness. The condition gradually wipes out the light-detecting rods and cones in the retina.

The experimental treatment adds a working copy of the culpable gene to the retinal cells of patients born with a defective copy. The trial also involved an experimental way of delivering gene therapy to the eye. Each patient’s retina was first lifted, and the gene therapy was injected into the space created under the retina. MacLaren and colleagues report on the condition of six patients in a study published on Wednesday in the Lancet.

Other groups are also developing gene therapies for retinal diseases. This includes a group at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which recently funded a new company to continue human trials of a treatment for Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis, another inherited form of retinal degeneration (see “New Gene Therapy Company Launches”).

Researchers Hendrik Scholl from John Hopkins University and José Sahel from the Institut de la Vision in Paris write in a commentary accompanying the research paper that since the surgery was performed only six months ago, it is too soon to determine if the therapy has achieved an important goal: to stop the loss of retina tissue.

“It’s going to take a couple of years to be sure,” says MacLaren.

Google is working on electronics-laden contact lenses to monitor glucose levels for diabetics. Welcome to the club.

Google is developing contact lenses with embedded electronics that can track the levels of glucose in a person’s tears and transmit that data wirelessly to a nearby receiver, an official blog post by Babak Parviz, a leader of the Google Glass wearable computing project revealed Thursday. The device is intended to help diabetics track their glucose levels without drawing blood.

Any detail on the activity of the secretive Google X laboratories is news, but this tidbit is not surprising to anyone that has followed Parviz’s career. We covered his work on contact lenses with electronics inside while he was a professor at the University of Washington back in 2008, where he even built one with 16 working LEDs embedded (see “How to Build a Bionic Eye”). Monitoring glucose levels was just one of several applications Parviz imagined for the technology at the time, along with providing a head-up display that could be used for augmented reality applications. That vision doesn’t seem so fanciful now that he’s working on the technology at Google, which is already slated to release its Google Glass wearable computer sometime this year. Parviz’s post about Google’s project indicates that his work on integrating LEDs into the lens also continues at Google.

Re/Code reports that Google’s glucose-sensing lens has been tested in people in a trial carried out in the Bay Area. The company’s blog post says that talks are underway with U.S. regulators:

“We’ve completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype … 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.”

Another electronic contact lens design, by Swiss company Sensimed, has been tested on people. Several hospitals are trialing it to track pressure levels in a person’s eye over a 24-hour period to help manage glaucoma (see “Glaucoma Test in a Contact Lens”).

One drawback both the Sensimed and Google designs have in common is that they use conventional rigid and opaque wires and electronic components. Last year researchers in Korea, in a collaboration involving Samsung, integrated a working LED built from novel, transparent and flexible nanomaterials into an off-the-shelf contact lens (see “Contact Lens Computer”).