A New Approach to Present a Non-Invasive Optical Glucose Sensor Using Advanced Opto-Electronic Technology

Diabetic patients are generally advised to check their blood glucose level 5 to 7 times per day. Since the all current existing conventional methods of home blood glucose tests are painful, intimidating, laborious, and expensive, since they require obtaining a blood sample by pricking a fingertip with a needle or lancet. Thus it is necessary to develop a non-invasive blood glucose method which could provide fast, painless, and convenient glucose monitoring to diabetic patients. Since a noninvasive method of monitoring blood glucose would present major advantages over current existing methods which are using invasive technologies, our group will attempt to develop and demonstrate the accurate results with our current non-invasive optical glucose system within physiologic glucose levels. We will apply the advanced opto-electronics technology to current study because our previous attempt wasn’t successful to detect the optical rotation of in vivo glucose concentration in physiologic range (0 to 500 mg/dl). We believe our previous system didn’t meet the required sensitivity and SNR. The proposed study with a non-invasive glucose sensing detector will be not only capable of monitoring glucose accurately enough to satisfy medical use criteria but also employing a more simplified method than existing optical glucose sensing technologies. The cost to patients of such a method would be significantly less over time than existing methods and the high monthly expense of testing strips would be avoided. In addition, patient acceptance would be very high because of the non-invasive nature and the simple and safe use of the procedure. Therefore, our optical glucose sensing technique using the optical rotatory effect of glucose have many advantages over currently existing invasive and noninvasive methods, since the method is based on shining a brief pulse of light into the front of the eye. Highly coherent light source, accurate optical components, and sophisticated analyzing system will be involved in this study. The optical glucose sensing method introduced in this study can be miniaturized using current integrated optics, electronics, and advanced micro fabrication technologies and has the potential to provide a low cost, fast, and compact noninvasive glucose sensor for the diabetic patients within near future. As a future study, we will investigate further in order to achieve high accuracy and ensure sensitivity to distinguish blood glucose levels within the physiologic range by using aqueous humor of eye because it has extremely fast response and recovery profile without significant delay by comparing with glucose concentration in blood plasma.