Development of glucose patch through flexible and packaged etalons

Abstract

An increasing number of people with diabetes are constituting a risk globally. Diabetes requires long-term and continuous treatment with several blood glucose measurements per day and insulin injections if necessary. General glucose meters named ‘finger pricker’, involve infection, pain in each measurement, and continuous cost expenditure. Recently, some research tried to find new methods to measure a blood glucose level without those limitations. Etalon is a system that measures glucose levels in sweat optically. It consists of a monolayer of p(NIPAM) microgels between two thin Cr/Au layers. Glucose injection swells microgels, and it increases the distance between two Cr/Au layers which changes the transmittance or reflectance of light. However, there is a limitation that existing etalons have a low resolution which cannot conduct in-vivo experiments. Herein, a glucose patch with flexible and packaged etalons was proposed. Etalons with different microgel synthesis methods were able to measure a glucose concentration of 0.5 mM, which was 15 times better than previous studies. Etalons were manufactured on flexible and transparent polyimides (PI) and showed color changes with different glucose concentrations. Besides, the idea of a packaged system was introduced.