A new light device to measure blood glucose levels is being developed by a company called MIT in the States, as featured in the journal Analytical Chemistry.
Researchers at MIT’s Spectroscopy Laboratory are working on a non-invasive way to measure blood glucose levels using light, which they say will take away the pain and inconvenience of blood glucose testing.
The new technique uses Raman spectroscopy, a method that identifies chemical compounds based on the frequency of vibrations of the bonds holding the molecule together. The technique can reveal glucose levels by simply scanning a patient’s arm or finger with near-infrared light, eliminating the need to draw blood.
Researchers in the Spectroscopy Lab have been developing this technology for about 15 years. One of the major obstacles they have faced is that near-infrared light penetrates only about half a millimeter below the skin, so it measures the amount of glucose in the fluid that bathes skin cells (known as interstitial fluid), not the amount in the blood.
To overcome this, the team came up with an algorithm that relates the two concentrations, allowing them to predict blood glucose levels from the glucose concentration in interstitial fluid.
However, this calibration becomes more difficult immediately after the patient eats or drinks something sugary, because blood glucose soars rapidly, while it takes five to 10 minutes to see a corresponding surge in the interstitial fluid glucose levels. Therefore, interstitial fluid measurements do not give an accurate picture of what’s happening in the bloodstream.
To address this a new calibration method, called Dynamic Concentration Correction (DCC), which incorporates the rate at which glucose diffuses from the blood into the interstitial fluid has been developed.
The researchers plan to launch a clinical study to test the DCC algorithm in healthy volunteers this Autumn.