United States: The discovery by the Waterloo scientific team solves a key problem in developing a non-invasive and easy measurement of glucose, which is crucial for those managing diabetics.
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Now, diabetics must monitor their blood-sugar levels with painful finger pricks or use cumbersome wearable patches with tiny needles.
However, the system developed by Dr. George Shaker, an adjunct associate professor at Waterloo’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his team erased the need for this, making pain minimum, the rate of infection low, and enhancing people’s living standards.
According to Shaker, “We’ve developed radar technology that can now fit inside a smartwatch and sense glucose levels more accurately than ever before,” uwaterloo.ca reported.
“Just like you use glasses to improve your vision, our technology helps for better sensing of glucose levels,” he added.
What more has the expert noted?
Shakers used weather satellites to demonstrate how the new system works: they use radar for the monitoring of the Earth’s atmosphere and, for example, for the measurement of storm movements and other kinds of cloud cover if necessary.
“We’ve figured a way to miniaturize these radar systems on satellites and put them in a wearable device and use the same radar technology that looks at changes in the atmosphere to look at changes in the human body,” he added.
The parts of the system include a radar chip used to both transmit and receive signals through the human body, an engineered “meta-surface” that helps amplify and direct these signals for better accuracy, and miniaturized microcontrollers that process the radar signals with the help of artificial intelligence algorithms.
The algorithms enhance the performance and the precision of the readings by using experience from the data collected.
“Unlike existing methods that require skin penetration, our system is entirely non-invasive and can detect even small changes in glucose levels,” Shaker added.
“No other technology can provide this level of precision without direct contact with the bloodstream,” he continued.
The distinguishing factor of this system is the meta-surface which Shaker and his group have engineered.
It also enhances the total resolution and sensitivity of radar even more, thereby increasing the accuracy of glucose measurements. But there is still much to be done to make it more efficient.
Despite the fact that engineers now use USB cables to deliver power to their devices, they are working to adapt them for direct use in batteries to make them portable.
They only want it to collect basic data for now, but in the future, they envisage it could also be used to get other health-related data like blood pressure. The team is thus collaborating with partners from the industry today to usher in the technology for the next generation of wearables.