Non – Invasive Blood Glucose Monitoring based on Visible LASER Light

Abstract

The conventional blood glucose monitoring (BGM) techniques currently used are invasive due to the collection of blood samples through finger prick making the process painful with the risk of infection. In recent years, researchers focus more on making BGM to be non-invasive by the virtue of near infrared (NIR) rays. However, NIR technique possesses certain limitations, viz. the absorption of light rays in human tissue, higher SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and low accuracy. Henceforth, these shortfalls have prevented NIR based blood glucose measurements from being utilized in healthcare market. To overcome these shortfalls, BGM by means of laser light is proposed in this work. Visible red laser light of wavelength 650 nm for BGM (RL-BGM) is implemented in this work to exploit the better transmittance of red laser through human tissue. The fact that the refractive index of laser light is more susceptible to changes in glucose concentration resulting in faster response times (~7-10s) compared to NIR makes visible red laser feasible for this application. The data obtained from the hardware is sent to the Thingspeak cloud server .The designed RL-BGM hardware module has been tested for both in-vitro and in-vivo cases. Results obtained in this work demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed system in achieving better accuracy in BGM on par with the standard glucometer used by the medical practitioners for monitoring blood sugar level in diabetic patients.