The Temporary Tattoo That Tests Blood Sugar.
An electronic sensor may mean the end of finger pricking.
UC San Diego
A painful prick of the fingertip
reveals a mountain of medical information for many diabetes patients.
But health professionals have long struggled to find a reliable and
painless way to gather blood sugar measurements. Just last year, Google
announced that it was developing contact lenses
that measure glucose levels in its user’s tears. But now, nanoengineers
may have found an even easier way for diabetes patients to monitor
their vital levels: temporary tattoos.
Amay Bandodkar, a researcher at the University
of California, San Diego, has created a flexible sensor that uses a mild
electrical current to measure glucose levels in a person’s body.
Measuring blood sugar levels multiple times a day is vital for diabetes
patients because it shows how well their body is managing their disease
as well as the dose of insulin they require, if they need any at all.
But because many people find needles unpleasant, they tend to avoid
measuring their levels, which puts them at risk of developing serious
medical complications. The new device is painless—It contains electrodes
printed on a thin tattoo paper that patients can even dispose after
use. “Presently the tattoo sensor can easily survive for a day,”
Bandodkar said in a statement. “These are extremely inexpensive—a few cents—and hence can be replaced without much financial burden on the patient.”
The tattoo has already provided accurate
glucose measures for seven healthy patients, the team reported in a
recent issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry. The
patients, all male non-diabetics between the ages of 20 and 40, wore
the tattoos before eating a sandwich and drinking a soda. Following the
carb-rich meal, the tattoo recorded the spike in each patient’s glucose
levels as accurately as a traditional finger-stick device. The tattoo is
a few steps away from providing the numeric value of glucose levels, so
scientists have to remove and analyze it in order to retrieve its
measurements. Eventually, Bandodkar said the tattoo will have “Bluetooth
capabilities to send this information directly to the patient's doctor
in real-time or store data in the cloud.”
The researchers hope the tattoo will eventually be used to
monitor levels of other compounds in the blood, like metabolites,
medications, or alcohol and illegal drugs. Whatever the application, the
fewer needles the better.
theatlantic.
