Fundamental study on non-invasive blood glucose sensing

Diabetes is a disease which severely threatens the health of human beings. Unfortunately, current monitoring techniques with finger sticks discourage the regular use. Noninvasive spectroscopic measurement of blood glucose is a simple and painless technique, and reduces the long-term health care costs of diabetic patients due to no reagents. It is suitable for home use. Moreover, the establishment of the methodology not only applies to blood glucose noninvasive measurement, but also can be extended to noninvasive measurement of other analytes in body fluid, which will be of important significance for the development of the technique of clinical analysis. In this paper, some fundamental researches, which have been achieved in our laboratory in the field of non-invasive blood glucose measurement, were introduced. 1. Fundamental research was done for the glucose concentrations from simple to complex samples with near and middle infrared spectroscopy: (1) the relationship between the instrument precision and prediction accuracy of the glucose measurement; (2) the change of the result of the quantitative measurement with the change of the complexity of samples; (3) the attempt of increasing the prediction accuracy of the glucose measurement by improving the methods of modeling. The research results showed that it is feasible for non-invasive blood glucose measurement with near and middle infrared spectroscopy in theory, and the experimental results, from simple to complex samples, proved that it is effective for the methodology consisting of hardware and software. 2. According to the characteristics of human body measurement, the effects of measuring conditions on measurement results, such as: (1) the effect of measurement position; (2) the effect of measurement pressure; (3) the effect of measurement site; (4) the effect of measured individual, were investigated. With the fundamental researches, the special problems of human body measurement were solved. In addition, the practical and effective method of noninvasive human blood glucose measurement was proposed.