Human body model with blood flow properties for non-invasive blood glucose measurement

Abstract

In this paper, the authors propose a human body model with the final goal of developing non-invasive blood glucose measurement. Most wearable devices today include antennas and signal processing circuitry capable of non-invasive measurements. Authors plan to extend this circuitry for non-invasive blood glucose measurement with microwave technique. An optimum design of a proposed system needs a human body model. The authors have studied and compared various proposed methods in the published literature for non-invasive blood glucose measurement. Comparative study has concluded that the published human body models have dielectric-based tissue modelling and it is difficult to change the blood glucose concentration in it. Hence, a new human body model is derived and implemented in this work. The proposed model has provision to imitate the human blood flow and can vary blood glucose concentration for simulation purposes. Its accuracy has been defined and the proposed model was compared with standard dataset. It is established in simulation that with changes in blood glucose concentration the dielectric constant, electrical conductivity and other electrical parameters of blood also vary. Based on this, the parameters of the antenna mounted on body are affected. An antenna is fabricated to compare the simulation results with the actual test. It is found that blood glucose variation on extreme ends of the glucose concentration has return loss variation in range of 4–6 dB, while in 170 mg/dL–450 mg/dL range the variation is in between 1 and 3 dB values.