Closely monitoring your blood sugar levels is one of the most important things you need to do when living with diabetes. However, repeatedly piercing your fingertips to check your blood sugar can be not only uncomfortable but inconvenient. Luckily, recent advances in this field have made blood-less tests a real possibility.
Let’s see how a non-invasive glucose test could become dominant in the future.
New Non-Invasive Glucose Test Development
There are several teams of scientific all over the world working on a blood-less, pain-free option to measure blood sugar without the need for finger-pricking. The researchers at the University of Bath specifically have developed a glucose patch that uses electrical impulses and doesn’t pierce the skin.
The researchers tested their invention on pig skin, as well as human volunteers. They found the patch could track glucose changes effectively.
How Does It Work?
This non-invasive glucose test uses an electric current to access glucose from the fluids found between skin cells across our hair follicles. This fluid then gets collected in small reservoirs and glucose levels are measured. You don’t need to calibrate it with a blood sample, which means there is no need for finger-pricking.
The patch can be used every 15 minutes and may be able to show glucose measurements on your smartwatch or smartphone. The next steps in this research should be to see whether the device can be fully functional throughout the whole day, further refine the design, and conduct several clinical trials.
The Bottom Line
It seems that we may be close to developing a non-invasive glucose test in the future. And, since scientists predict that the number of diabetics worldwide may reach 366 million by 2030, this discovery seems to be coming at the right time.
