Reading glasses may become obsolete soon

Shortly after I passed 45 years of age, I became very frustrated about my eye-vision. Almost like suddenly, I could not read anything small. For all my life, my eye vision was always excellent. As such you can imagine how much frustration I had during this transition. Now many years have passed and I have got used to it, presbyopia. I now have probably 10 reading glasses, in cars, different rooms, in my office bags etc. I’m sure many of you with my age have experienced the same. We can hardly survive without reading glasses now! But there is a hope now that reading glasses may become something obsolete and of history.

If you haven’t noticed, Alcon, the eye-care division of Novartis has just announced a deal with Google to develop health care products by using Google’s technology: smart lens. One very promising product from this partnership that may materialize in just a few years is the contact lens for presbyopia. In other words, people like me and you over 40-50 will not need reading glasses anymore as the smart contact lens will automatically adjust for either looking out in distance or looking in near field. Just imagine and try to visualize what kind of freedom you will have if you don’t need to always remember to carry reading glasses wherever you go.  This is going to be a huge market as there are about 2 billion people in the world who have some difficulty reading. Even just a fraction of this population who choose to use this smart contact lens would mean a big chunk of money for Novartis and Google. In addition to the strictly eye-related clinical use of this new technology, it is also under development to use the smart lens to monitor glucose levels for diabetic patients (DM). If successful, DM patients, which again is a huge population and increasing, will not use needle to spike their fingers anymore to measure their glucose levels. Also imagine what kind of potential this will be!

Both Novartis (NVS) and Google (GOOGL) are the powerful dominators in their respective sectors. Novartis is focusing on pharmaceuticals, eye-care and generics. The two joining together may lead to something really revolutionary benefiting both patients and investors!