Fiber loop ringdown glucose sensors: initial tests in human diabetic urines

Abstract

Fiber loop ringdown technique has shown promise in biomedical applications in recent studies. In the present work, fiber loop ringdown sensors using the evanescent field as the sensing mechanism have been fabricated and tested in actual human urines for the first time. In order to evaluate the sensors’ performance, the sensors were comparatively tested in healthy human urines, synthetic urine solutions, and diabetic urines. Due to different features or chemical compositions of each urine sample, the sensors experience different optical losses, equivalently, different ringdown times. The comparative results show that evanescent field-fiber loop ringdown glucose sensors can discriminate the three different urine samples by displaying different ringdown times. The evanescent field-fiber loop ringdown glucose sensors had fast response, good reproducibility, and high sensitivity. The promising results imply that the evanescent field-fiber loop ringdown sensors have potential for near real-time detection of diabetic urines.