Google patented a wearable that reminds you to take your meds

Google has yet to enter the wearable market directly, but a recent patent filing from the company suggests that it might be working on its own wearable gadget. The patent describes a wearable gadget that can detect when its user is eating food, and will use the opportunity to remind the user to take whatever medication they’re required to take for that day. It’s important to note that the vast majority of patents never make their way into an actual product, so this doesn’t mean that Google is actually working on its own wearable, but it does mean the company us at least considering it.

Google is well known for filing and obtaining patents of new technologies and systems every now and then. Though many of such patents never see the light of the day as independent systems, it does help us in getting insights onto what all tech are these tech giants envisioning. The latest of such patents filed by Google is that of a meal based medication reminder system. The system is a wearable tech which will sense a pre-defined activity or movement associated with a person ingesting food. Based on these inputs, it will send a reminder to the person to take required medicines at the time of the meal. The patent was filed by two Google employees based in Israel- Asaf Zomet and Michael Shynar- in July 2014. It was recently published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The device is fed pre-defined activity data such as at least one of image data of portions of food, a motion profile, image data of portions of a cheekbone, image data of portions of utensils, a mapping service to look up a restaurant, an eating schedule, an eating time, ambient audio to determine co-presence of others who are eating, a blood sugar level, motion data, a database of coordinates of restaurants, and a trained classifier.