Will the Noninvasive Glucose Monitoring Revolution Ever Arrive?

A needle-free alternative to the finger-prick test would be a godsend for many sufferers of diabetes, but the industry has yet to clear the technological hurdles.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 8 min read

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Update (November 26): Verily has paused development of its glucose-sensing contact lens. The company, formerly Google Life Sciences, acknowledged in a statement earlier this month (November 16) that “there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device.”

In the early 2000s, a long-standing problem affecting diabetes sufferers around the world seemed on the brink of being solved. After years of research and development, a needle-free device to measure a person’s blood glucose levels was coming to market—a game-changer for patients fed up with the messy and painful procedure of the blood-drawing finger-prick test.

Worn like a wristwatch, Cygnus Incorporated’s GlucoWatch G2 Biographer used weak electric currents to draw glucose ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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