GluMo: A Noninvasive Blood Glucose Monitor

Diabetics are used to pricking their fingertips in order to check their glucose level. In an effort to sunset that practice, Santa Clara University’s Ethical, Pragmatic, and Intelligent Computing (EPIC) Laboratory has envisioned, designed, and prototyped a portable noninvasive glucose monitoring medical instrument which we have dubbed GluMo. In place of a drop of blood GluMo uses Infrared (IR) light emitters and receivers as part of a small form factor Internet of Things (IoT) medical instrument which calculates the amount of the IR wave’s interaction with glucose molecules within the blood stream. The information is then transmitted to a database for tracking, history building, and data visualization for the patient (and potentially the patient’s doctor if authorized). Since current single droplet blood glucose meters are attainable as cheap as 10 USD, in order to keep GluMo’s cost under 100 USD without diminishing the accuracy of the reading outside of an acceptable bounds, Near Infrared (NIR/IR-A DIN) emitters at the 1300 nanometer (nm) wavelength and corresponding receivers were chosen for the prototype. The choice of 1300nm NIR/IR-A comes from the fact that 60% of human blood is water (H2O) and 1300nm NIR/IR-A has the largest positive difference between its absorbance in glucose and its absorbance in water among the other wavelengths of IR in the NIR/IR-A range. Keywords–Blood Glucose Monitor; Infrared (IR); Internet of Things (IoT); Medical Instrumentation; Non-invasive.