Google Acquires Lift Labs; the makers of Spoon For Parkinson’s Patients
Google’s latest acquisition is the Lift Labs, the company behind the spoon designed to make Parkinson’s patients’ lives easier. The buying of another biotech company by Google serves to show the companies ambitious initiative to establish itself in the health technology industry. This is said to have been sparked by the company’s co-founder Sergey Brin personal interest.
In 2013, Google became the largest investor in Calico, a company doing research on medical technologies that could extend life. Lift Labs is expected to join Google research division Google X.
Lift Labs’s most remarkable development so far is the spoon equipped with sensors to detect tremors by Parkinson’s patients and cancels those tremors by up to 70%. The technology that went into production of this innovative spoon is similar to the technology used in cameras for the image stabilization feature that compensate for user’s shaky hands while taking a picture.
Google announced this acquisition on its Google+ social network but fell short of mentioning the financial terms. The statement read as follows:
“Today we’re welcoming the Lift Labs team into Google X. Their tremor-cancelling device could improve quality of life for millions of people.”
Lift Labs in a statement also said, “Google will enable us to reach even more people living with Parkinson’s or essential tremor who could benefit from using tremor-cancelling devices every day.”
Google is aggressively entering the medical technology scene. This can be again evidenced by its unveiling of the smart contact lenses back in January, this year. The said smart contact lenses measures glucose levels in user’s tears and can help in monitoring diabetes patients.
Again, in July this year, Google announced yet another ambitious project dubbed the Basline Study. This is a project that collects anonymous genetic and molecular information and maps out a picture of what a normal healthy human being should look like.
Sergey Brin’s interest into the medical technology scene is not just for commercial reason but for personal reasons. Brin’s own mother developed Parkinson’s, and he has been tested and found to have higher chances of developing the disease as well.
Larry Page, his co-founder, also suffers from a very rare vocal cords disorder and has grown very interested in finding out how Big Data could be used to solve leading causes of diseases in the world. Page has in the past campaigned for people becoming less fearful over their medical records privacy and making them available for researchers to conduct medical research.
All these medical acquisitions will be part of Google X; Google’s secretive research facility established to develop and improve on cutting-edge technology. To read more about Google X’s developments we have previously featured, click here.
