A new way of monitoring glucose using laser may help improve the quality of life of thousands of diabetes patients around the world.
People with diabetes are certainly familiar with glucose monitoring. It's a necessary step since their disease compels them to avoid having too much or too little sugar in the blood.
However, glucose monitoring has always been invasive: A patient uses strips and a glucometer for the test. The patient then pricks a finger and places a drop of blood into the strip, which is then processed by the glucometer. Since blood sugar can fluctuate throughout the day, the test should be repeated many times.
Not only is this exam costly since a test strip can be used just once, it's also time-consuming and even messy. Those who are uncomfortable with pricking may find the procedure stressful.
A team of researchers from the University of Leeds led by Professor Gin Jose has created a promising technology to avoid the inconvenience and stress of traditional glucose monitoring.
The device has a surface made of ionized silica glass. Once a patient uses a finger to touch it, it delivers laser, whose fluorescence (or amount of glow or light it emits) can vary depending on the amount of sugar in the bloodstream. The length of time the fluorescence lasts can also be used to effectively measure glucose. The emitted laser is very low that it doesn't burn the skin.
The technology is designed to be portable so users can now easily test glucose anytime they want. The researchers also believe this is going to be less costly in the long run as users don't have to buy boxes of strips.
Further, they envision the device to work with mobile apps, which will then allow the patients to send monitoring results to their doctors after every test.
The device is currently going through more trials to meet health regulations and standards. But so far, it has 95.5% accuracy, which is at par with traditional monitoring system.
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