American scientists have invented a sensor to detect the amount of glucose in the blood through sweat, which is affixed to the skin like a sticker.
It was developed by Larry Cheng, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and his colleagues, and details have been published online in the latest issue of the research journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
It should be noted that like blood, sweat also contains sugar (sugar ie glucose) but its amount is 100 times less than that of blood.
According to the traditional method, to determine the amount of sugar in the blood, a drop of blood is drawn by inserting a needle in the finger and placed on a special kind of small strip.
The strip is inserted into a "glucometer", a device that measures blood sugar and detects the amount of sugar in the blood over the next few seconds and displays it on the screen.
The process of finding blood sugar can also be made pain-free and easy by getting rid of needle sticking and bleeding.
This device has also been designed with this requirement in mind, in which a thin layer of nickel metal has been applied to a substance called "graphene" to enable it to measure glucose in sweat.
Professor Larry Cheng says that the most important problem was finding out the exact amount of glucose in the sweat, which his team finally solved after a long research.
The device is glued to the skin to determine the amount of glucose in the blood. If the wearer is not sweating, then light exercise is done to get rid of the sweat.
This sweat reaches the microscopic chambers at the bottom of the device, where the nickel metal accurately measures the glucose in the sweat by interacting with the glucose molecules in it.
The device's automated system then multiplies the amount of glucose in the sweat by 100, which is equal to the amount of glucose in the blood at that time.
Including all its arrangements, this device is about the size of a one rupee coin while it is also very flexible.
In the initial experiments, it was glued to the skin of a volunteer's arm with a harmless glue to determine the amount of glucose in the blood, which was exactly what was detected by a glucometer.
Now this team of experts is preparing more experiments so that this invention can be improved and finalized as soon as possible and presented for sale in the market.
He hopes the device will be less expensive and will make it easier to monitor blood glucose regularly.
This device will be of great benefit to diabetics who have to go through frequent needle piercings to monitor their blood glucose on a daily basis.
