Abstract
In this article, a novel sensing approach is presented for glucose level monitoring where a robust low-power millimeter(mm)-wave radar system is used to differentiate between blood samples of disparate glucose concentrations in the range 0.5 to 3.5 mg/mL. The proposed radar sensing mechanism shows greater capabilities for remote detection of blood glucose inside test tubes through detecting minute changes in their dielectric properties. In particular, the reflected mm-waves that represent unique signatures for the internal synthesis and composition of the tested blood samples, are collected from the multi-channels of the radar and analyzed using signal processing techniques to identify different glucose concentrations and correlate them to the reflected mm-wave readings. The mm-wave spectrum is chosen for glucose sensing in this study after a set of preliminary experiments that investigated the dielectric permittivity behavior of glucose-loaded solutions across different frequency bands. In this regard, a newly-developed commercial coaxial probe kit (DAK-TL) is used to characterize the electromagnetic properties of glucose-loaded samples in a broad range of frequencies from 300 MHz to 67 GHz using two different 50 Ω open-coaxial probes. This would help to determine the portion of the frequency spectrum that is more sensitive to slight variations in glucose concentrations as indicated by the amount of change in the dielectric constant and loss tangent parameters due to the different concentrations under test. The mm-wave frequency range 50 to 67 GHz has shown to be promising for acquiring both high sensitivity and sufficient penetration depth for the most interaction between the glucose molecules and electromagnetic waves. The processed results have indicated the reliability of using mm-wave radars in identifying changes in blood glucose levels while monitoring trends among those variations. Particularly, blood samples of higher glucose concentrations are correlated with reflected mm-wave signals of greater energy. The proposed system could likely be adapted in the future as a portable non-invasive continuous blood glucose level monitoring for daily use by diabetics.
Highlights
Humankind is suffering from a lot of illnesses and epidemics
Motivated by the results of our prior study in [67] that succeeded in differentiating the amount of sugar in three different drinks using the reflection data from one channel of a 4-port microwave network analyzer N5227A PNA-67GHz from Keysight technologies; in this study, radar sensing and signal processing were employed for the purpose of identifying the glucose levels in synthetic blood samples of various glucose concentrations typical to the diabetes condition
Towards the purpose of developing a non-invasive glucose monitoring sensor for diabetics, in this paper, the dielectric properties of binary glucose-water samples of small concentrations like blood glucose levels of diabetics were first investigated through measurements using a commercial coaxial kit in the broad band 300 MHz–67 GHz
Summary
Humankind is suffering from a lot of illnesses and epidemics. One of the most common diseases increasingly prevalent among human beings is diabetes. Radars have demonstrated success in the health scope for a variety of applications such as sleep monitoring [63], sensing the respiratory and heart rates [64], emotion tracking [65], gas detection [66], and many other aspects of radar capabilities are still under exploration Continuing these efforts in radars health applications, a compact low-cost integrated sensing system that utilizes mm-wave radars is proposed to remotely detect glucose concentration levels for diabetes patients. Motivated by the results of our prior study in [67] that succeeded in differentiating the amount of sugar in three different drinks (coke, diet coke, and zero coke) using the reflection data from one channel of a 4-port microwave network analyzer N5227A PNA-67GHz from Keysight technologies; in this study, radar sensing and signal processing were employed for the purpose of identifying the glucose levels in synthetic blood samples of various glucose concentrations typical to the diabetes condition.
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