They seem to be using radio waves instead of optical? Do radio waves penetrate the body or do they hypothesize that there will be changes on the surface of the skin due to blood sugar/pressure?
Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
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Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#32> Currently, diabetics must frequently prick their fingers or rely on invasive wearable patches with micro-needles to track their blood-sugar levels Type 1 diabetic here - for what it's worth, CGMs aren't particularly invasive. At least in comparison to the many many years of finger pricking! But a smart watch solution would be cool. (I actually do get my CGM readings on my smart watch, which is really nice!) I know…
CGMs are probably going to still be more accurate, so the watch may not be ideal for Type 1, but could be nice for people with pre-diabetes who are trying to optimize their health. I'm also curious how accurate they will be.
CGMs themselves are still inaccurate compared to needles. And even needle based meters have a lot of different levels of accuracy. A CGM, even once calibrated, may be off by as much as 10%.
Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#33They seem to be using radio waves instead of optical? Do radio waves penetrate the body or do they hypothesize that there will be changes on the surface of the skin due to blood sugar/pressure?
Yes, it is sub optical RF sensing. The important factor here is that the gluclose blood capacitively couples to small sensing antennas. The sensing antennas are resonant elements, whose exact resonance changes depending on the surrounding environment, in this case gluclose in the blood. You can then transmit an RF signal to the antenna, then record the signal reflected from the antenna’s port to estimate the gluclose level.
Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#34They seem to be using radio waves instead of optical? Do radio waves penetrate the body or do they hypothesize that there will be changes on the surface of the skin due to blood sugar/pressure?
> Do radio waves penetrate the body
Generally, yes. Attenuation varies by frequency, and I guess blood sugar and pressure, though.
Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#35Sounds exciting, but the fact their prototype is in a wristwatch form factor makes me wonder if it's aiming to be more of a media showpiece to hype investment valuation from those industry partners. Forward looking statements like "maybe we'll make it monitor blood pressure too" don't help. Even at the size of a brick, or without conveniently hiding the power supply off-camera, forgoing needles would still be a huge…
That's because it's bullshit. To clarify, the actual science they did is interesting (to me at least, as someone not in the field). The paper is linked here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 What is bullshit is the completely unwarranted conclusions in the title or in the quotes in the article. This is classic "science by press release". If you notice in the paper, they didn't do any testing, at all…
I thought apple was trying to get glucose monitoring approved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noninvasive_glucose_monitor#Ne...
(different technique)
Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#36Sounds exciting, but the fact their prototype is in a wristwatch form factor makes me wonder if it's aiming to be more of a media showpiece to hype investment valuation from those industry partners. Forward looking statements like "maybe we'll make it monitor blood pressure too" don't help. Even at the size of a brick, or without conveniently hiding the power supply off-camera, forgoing needles would still be a huge…
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Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#37How can an algorithm be "artificial intelligence algorithm"? Does it mean AI models are used for data fitting? Or clustering? For data generated in such low scales, wouldnt statistical methods or procedural methods be sufficient or efficient or both?
As an engineer working in the field who has designed both cloud algorithms and on-firmware algorithms, when marketing uses AI, it tends to just be training/data fitting. At best, the most complicated ones tend to be random forests and if any use neural networks, it’s usually just overkill.
The answer to your last question is yes, especially when it’s from raw signals.
Tbf, there are applications from devices that do use deep learning methods but from experience they are not practical except on very edge cases.
Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
CGMs are probably going to still be more accurate, so the watch may not be ideal for Type 1, but could be nice for people with pre-diabetes who are trying to optimize their health. I'm also curious how accurate they will be.
CGMs themselves are still inaccurate compared to needles. And even needle based meters have a lot of different levels of accuracy. A CGM, even once calibrated, may be off by as much as 10%.
My understanding is that CGMs shine at having a large volume of good data. You can see how your biometrics are trending over time much better than the <10/day readings someone with manual testing will receive.
Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, cool and certainly some improvement but Freestyle is good enough already. Next step for me is more towards the new insulin research which activates only on glucose in the bloodstream (don’t recall how it was called but was here more recently also shared). This sounded more self controlling where it’s hopefully just making sure you have enough of it in your body and don’t need to take care of the rest. Until t…
> Freestyle is good enough already In my experience, the quality control isn't very good (some patches will read much more accurately than others) and accuracy isn't that good when you get out of normal ranges. I don't think the "invasive" nature of the Freestyle is a problem at all, but it would be nice to see some innovation on either the cost or the accuracy or both.
OP lacks imagination for sure. This would reduce infections, prevent compression lows, be more discrete and potentially increase accuracy.
In no way would I describe CGM as solved, and this would go a long way towards filling many of the gaps, especially in younger / older / less compliant patient populations.
Re: Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately
#40Even orange pi watch promised something like this... Do we have any updates on it? https://www.notebookcheck.net/Orange-Pi-Watch-D-Pro-New-smar...
It won’t fly under the radar when this technology actually works. The FDA actually has warned, IIRC, that there’s a bunch of charlatans selling stuff that doesn’t work.