Touch And Hold Hands With Your Loved Ones Online

 Touching a loved one can be so soothing and when you are going through tough times, a mere squeeze of hand could help uplift your mood. However, this changes when you are away from your loved ones. You can talk and now video chat, all thanks to technology, but there has been no such thing to mimic touch, well not until now. Meet Frebble that has been designed by Frederic Petrignani, an entrepreneur from Netherlands. The gadget is currently raising funds at Kickstarter.

Frebble relies on Bluetooth to connect to your system and in words of its manufacturers; ‘For a granddaughter calling grandma with special news, for a husband far away from a wife, for distant grown daughters who crave the comfort of their mother’s touch, for a best friend who wants to let her friend know it will all be ok, Frebble connects – as simply, subtly and as powerfully as though the person was right there with you. While there are many ways to see and hear your loved ones through the power of the internet, the tactile element has been missing – until now. With Frebble, you can cut through the distance and share that smallest gesture – the squeeze of the hand – that means so much.

 Moving on to the design of the gadget; it has been designed ergonomically so that it can fit easily and comfortably in the hand of the user and better stimulate the feeling of holding and squeezing other person’s hand. When you press your Frebble unit, the corresponding unit will apply pressure to the other intended receiver’s hand. This is true irrespective of the fact that where they are. The effect is achieved by making use of two pressure sensors on the front of the device that register the ‘squeeze’ and two vibration motors that are located on the side in order to make the sensation feel more realistic. The gadget also has an integrated bar known as squeeze bar in order to replicate the holding hands.

An LED will light up to indicate the connection status and also when you have got a squeeze waiting. Yup, you can send offline squeezes too folks. The gadget will be compatible with Skype, Hangout and other apps (iOS, Android) that are set to release in September along with Frebble. Each unit measures about 5” in length and comes equipped with a rechargeable Lithium Polymer battery that can survive for 4 hours if being used or more if on standby. The gadget is made from plastic while also imparting rubberized padded areas in order to impart easy gripping.

The gadget will be able to charge by employing a micro-USB cable and will be able to work with Google Chrome version 24 or higher and Firefox version 16 and higher. The gadget is available as a pair for a price of $89 on Kickstarter.

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Google Announces 'Smart' Contact Lenses That Monitor Glucose Levels

Google has announced that it is testing a prototype for a contact lens that would help people with diabetes manage their disease.

In a press release distributed Thursday, the company said that the lens it is designing would measure glucose in tears continuously using a wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor. Google says that using the lenses would be a less invasive method of measuring glucose levels than finger-pricking.

It also claims that the more frequent testing would consequently reduce the risks associated with infrequent glucose testing such as kidney failure and blindness.

The contact lenses were developed during the past 18 months in the clandestine Google X lab that also came up with a driver-less car, Google's Web-surfing eyeglasses and Project Loon, a network of large balloons designed to beam the Internet to unwired places.

“We wondered if miniaturized electronics — think chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair — might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy,” Google said in its press release.

“We hope a tiny, super sensitive glucose sensor embedded in a contact lens could be the first step in showing how to measure glucose through tears, which in the past has only been theoretically possible.”

The chip and sensor would be embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material, while a pinhole in the lens would allow fluid from the surface of the eye to seep into the sensor.

Palo Alto Medical Foundation endocrinologist Dr. Larry Levin said it was remarkable and important that a tech firm like Google is getting into the medical field, and that he'd like to be able to offer his patients a pain-free alternative from either pricking their fingers or living with a thick needle embedded in their stomach for constant monitoring.

"Google, they're innovative, they are up on new technologies, and also we have to be honest here, the driving force is money," he told The Associated Press.

Worldwide, the glucose monitoring devices market is expected to be more than $16 billion by the end of this year, according to analysts at Renub Research.

The Google team built the wireless chips in clean rooms, and used advanced engineering to get integrated circuits and a glucose sensor into such a small space.

Researchers also had to build in a system to pull energy from incoming radio frequency waves to power the device enough to collect and transmit one glucose reading per second. The embedded electronics in the lens don't obscure vision because they lie outside the eye's pupil and iris.

Google is now looking for partners with experience bringing similar products to market. Google officials declined to say how many people worked on the project, or how much the firm has invested in it.

An early, outsourced clinical research study with real patients was encouraging, but there are many potential pitfalls yet to come, said University of North Carolina diabetes researcher Dr. John Buse, who was briefed by Google on the lens last week.

"This has the potential to be a real game changer," he said, "but the devil is in the details."

While excited about their prototype, Google warned that there is still a lot more work that needs to be done before it could be turned into a useable product.

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