Abstract:
Diabetes is a chronic disease that affects more than 8.5% of the worldwide
population. The glucometer, which is invasive, is the standard tool for monitoring
glucose levels. This approach is painful and uncomfortable. Furthermore, it
is not befitting to provide continuous glucose monitoring, often leading to missing
some serious hyperglycemic and hypoglycemic events that could occur between
finger-prick measurements. To overcome this problem, minimally invasive technologies
have been developed. However, the frequent use of such techniques
causes discomfort and pain in addition to high socio-economic burdens. Therefore,
painless, needle-free, and continuous glucose monitoring sensors are needed
to enhance the quality of life of millions of diabetic patients around the world.
Today, holistic non-invasive approaches are not commercially available. Different
approaches have been introduced in research such as: reverse iontophoresis, bioimpedance
spectroscopy, infrared and ocular spectroscopy and ultrasound. Such
technologies suffer from several difficulties. For instance, interstitial fluid glucose
levels measurements carry a serious time-delay compared to the plasma glucose
levels. Additionally, the stability, safety and portability of the underlying technologies
constitute their main challenges. Nowadays, researchers are focusing on
electromagnetism as a leading technology to achieve noninvasive and continuous
glucose monitoring.
Here, we propose a non-invasive continuous wearable glycemic monitoring electromagnetic
based multi-sensor system with enhanced sensitivity. The system
wirelessly senses hypo- to hyper-glycemic variations with very high accuracy. It
leverages novel vasculature-anatomy-inspired electromagnetic front-end components.
These components are designed to target simultaneously multiple body
locations. Multiple environmental and physiological sensors are also integrated in the proposed system to calibrate out the perturbing factors. The system is
validated on serum, animal tissues and in a clinical setting. Serum-based and
ex-vivo experiments demonstrate high precision across the diabetic glucose range
(10mg/dl - 600mg/dl). Human trials exhibit clinical accuracy of 98% in fifty five
subjects who underwent around hundred Oral Glucose Tolerance Tests. The proposed
sensors are embedded in a glove and a sock; results are validated on the sensors
both standalone and collectively. The system captures the clinical glycemic
variations without any time-lag, reporting up to 96% correlation between the
system’s physical parameters and blood glucose levels. To our knowledge this
is one of the rare studies to assess the sensitivity of the proposed sensors over
a wide glycemic range (10mg/dl to 600 mg/dl), in different experimental setups
and to calibrate out the multiple environmental and physiological factors.
Advisor(s):
Costantine, Joseph; Kanj, Rouwaida; Eid, Assaad
Description:
Prof. Zaher Dawy,
Prof. Nadine Darwiche,
Prof. Youssef Tawk,
Prof. Nadey Hakim,
Prof. Sami Azar,
Prof. Emmanouil Tentzeris,
Prof. Ali Ramadan.