Scientists have developed a sensor that can monitor blood sugar levels by analysing sweaty skin.<\/p>\n
But rather than a gym-soaked t-shirt, it needs just one millionth of a litre of sweat to do the testing.<\/p>\n
The team – in South Korea – showed the sensor was accurate and think it could eventually help patients with diabetes.<\/p>\n
And in extra tests on mice, the sensor was hooked up to a patch of tiny needles to automatically inject diabetes medication.<\/p>\n
The team at the Seoul National University were trying to overcome the need for “painful blood collection” needed in diabetes patients.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Type 1 diabetes is caused by the immune system attacking the part of the body that controls blood sugar levels<\/p>\n
\u2022 Type 2 diabetes is often caused by lifestyle damaging the body’s ability to control blood sugar levels<\/p>\n
\u2022 Patients with both conditions need to medically control their blood sugar levels to prevent damage to the body and even death<\/p>\n
This is how patients with diabetes would normally keep track of blood sugar levels:<\/p>\n
The sensor is flexible so it can move with the skin it is stuck onto.<\/p>\n
However, the scientists needed to overcome a series of challenges to make it work.<\/p>\n
There is less sugar in sweat than blood so it is harder to find, and other chemicals in sweat such as lactic acid can disrupt the results.<\/p>\n
So the patch has three sensors keeping track of sugar levels, four that test the acidity of the sweat and a humidity sensor to analyse the amount of sweat.<\/p>\n
It is all encased in a porous layer that allows the sweat to soak through and bathe the electronics.<\/p>\n
All this information is passed onto a portable computer which does the analysis to work out the sugar levels.<\/p>\n
Tests before and after people sat down for a meal, published in the journal Science Advances, showed the results from the sweat patch “agree well” with those from traditional kit.<\/p>\n
However, for the next stage the researchers turned to mice with diabetes.<\/p>\n
They used the blood sugar monitor to control an array of microneedles to give the mice doses of the diabetes drug metformin.
\nThe researchers conclude: “The current system provides important new advances toward the painless and stress-free” care for diabetes.<\/p>\n
However, there is a leap between proving something can sense sugar levels in a lab and turning that into something that is so reliable people can put their lives in its hands.<\/p>\n
So the researchers next want to test how the patches work in the long-term.<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Scientists have developed a sensor that can monitor blood sugar levels by analysing sweaty skin. But rather than a gym-soaked t-shirt, it needs just one millionth of a litre of sweat to do the testing. The team – in South Korea – showed the sensor was accurate and think it could eventually help patients with diabetes. And in extra tests on mice, the sensor was hooked up to a patch of tiny needles to automatically inject diabetes medication. The team at the Seoul National University were trying to overcome the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5810,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5809\/revisions\/5810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}