(Newswire.net — January 16, 2015) — Amay Bandodkar, a graduate student in Nano Engineering and at the Center for Wearable Sensors at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California in San Diego, invented with her colleagues a tattoo-like sensor, which can detect the blood sugar level of the person wearing it.
An easy-to-wear, temporary tattoo can accurately measure glucose levels in the skin, allowing diabetics to monitor their levels voiding the unpleasant finger prick test.
Pricking the finger several times a day is annoyingly painful experience, no matter how sophisticated the digital measuring device that they are using is. The tattoo would allow them to monitor their levels continuously and painlessly, the scientists say.
The glucose-measuring tattoo testing results were published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, along with the explanation of how it works.
Instead of measuring blood, the patch extracts and measures glucose in the fluid between skin cells, which is unnoticeable. It does this by applying a very mild electrical charge to the skin for 10 minutes. The charge forces the sodium ions – which carry glucose – from between the skin cells, flowing towards the tattoo’s very sensitive sensors.
The only thing that is missing is the numerical read-out that diabetics must have to regulate their blood sugar level – but Bandodkar’s team is working on adding that in the future.
“The readout instrument will also eventually have Bluetooth capabilities to send this information directly to the patient’s doctor in real-time or store data in the cloud,” said Bandodkar in a press release.
Other setback is the duration of the patch, because right now it only lasts for about a day, however, the team is working on ways to expend the lifetime of the patch.
“Presently the tattoo sensor can easily survive for a day. These are extremely inexpensive – a few cents – and hence can be replaced without much financial burden on the patient,” said Bandodkar.
A similar device called GlucoWatch was launched in 2002, but was discontinued because it caused skin irritation. According to a report, the tattoo uses a much lower electrical current, users don’t feel anything except for a mild tingling in the first 10 seconds of use.