Researchers at Waterloo Engineering are developing a new patch that would offer diabetics an affordable, accurate, pain-free, round-the-clock alternative to traditional tests that require pricking a finger for a blood sample every few hours.
And to make it even more user-friendly, potentially life-saving readings from the patch would be transmitted to people’s smartphones.
A new, painless patch for glucose monitoring is just one centimetre square.
After three years of work, the research team is perfecting a wearable patch that uses hundreds of tiny microneedles to sense glucose levels, crucial information for diabetics who need to know exactly how much medication they require at any one time.
“This will improve people’s lifestyle by leading to more personalized medicine-taking,” said Peyman GhavamiNejad, an electrical and computer engineering PhD student who led the work. “We want to make it easier for people to monitor themselves, without any pain, with better control of the levels of their glucose and so they know how much insulin to take.”
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