Web and tech giant company Google has filed a patent for "needle-free blood draw." Possible designs could be a wrist-worn wearable or just a hand-held device that draws blood from different parts of the body.
The device reportedly works by sending a sudden surge of gas into a barrel with micro-particles that can "attain enough momentum to pierce the aperture membrane and penetrate adjacent dermal tissue" and drawing blood through the negative pressure tube. This will create a faster and aesthetic means of getting blood samples skipping the conventional, painful 'pin prick' method.
The machine can purportedly replace glucose monitoring devices eventually. In the paper, the patent claims that "Such an application might be used to draw a small amount of blood, for example, for a glucose test."
These days, big companies are gearing on health-related wearable devices that make vital signs monitoring possible and easier as a battlefield. An example is Chaotic Moon's tech-powered tattoo that allows biometrics measurement possible and Google's smart contact lenses and bandage-sized, cloud-connected sensors that help patients with diabetes monitor their sugar levels. If these two projects are successful, they will be making 29 million American lives suffering from diabetes more comfortable.
Nevertheless, there is no assurance that all these patents will actually turn into real ones. In an email to The Verge, a Google representative wrote "we hold patents on a variety of ideas - some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don't. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patents."
It can be recalled last year that Google launched Google Fit to compete with Apple's HealthKit, which gathers and organizes all health-related details into one place and will soon send all these data to their immediate healthcare personnel.
