Your tears might someday double as a health check.
Dr. Tueng Shen, an eye surgeon and bioengineer at the University of Washington, is helping develop a tiny sensor that could sit inside a tear duct and track what’s happening in the body in real time.
“We tear all the time, not just when we cry,” Shen said. “And our tears are actually very similar to blood.”
The idea, backed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, is to measure things like inflammation and blood sugar through tear fluid—potentially offering a needle-free way to monitor conditions such as diabetes.
About the size of a grain of rice, the device could collect data continuously for months and send it wirelessly. It’s modeled after tiny tear-duct plugs already used to treat dry eyes and wouldn’t require surgery.
Shen said the technology is still in early stages but could eventually lead to a new way of tracking health—using something as simple as tears.
“We could sample the tear components minute by minute, pretty much continuously,” Shen said.” That stands in contrast to blood draws, which capture the body’s information only in a single moment.
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