Non-invasive Glucose Monitoring using Supercontinuum Laser

Diabetes has become a worldwide problem. Approximately 400 million people around the world are affected by diabetes. For diabetes patients, in order to monitor the blood glucose level, they have to take blood several times a day with an invasive needle. To solve this problem and improve the quality of life of diabetes patients, we are developing a non-invasive method to measure glucose level with our super-continuum laser.

Our non-invasive glucose monitoring system utilize the glucose combinational bands from ~2000nm to ~2400nm since they fall in water absorption minimum valleys without interference from hemoglobin features. We estimate that our SWIR-SC laser improves the system SNR by at least 50 times compared to lamps due to the high brightness reaching the detector without saturation, even after passing through a highly absorbed background such as water. In our experiments, we demonstrate that low concentration glucose solutions down to 1mg/dl can be measured using an all fiber integrated short-wave infrared super-continuum (SWIR-SC) laser as the light source in a balanced arm spectroscopy system.

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Links

“High SNR Glucose Monitoring using a SWIR Super-Continuum Light Source” (2016)