Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Monitoring Using a Curved Goubau Line

Abstract

Non-invasive blood glucose monitoring at microwave frequencies is generally thought to be unreliable in terms of reproducibility of measurements. The failure to reproduce a blood glucose measurement from one experiment to another is in major part due to the unwanted interaction of leaky waves between the ambient environment and the blood glucose measuring device. In this work, we have overcome this problem by simply eliminating the leaky modes through the use of surface electromagnetic waves from a curved Goubau line. In the proposed methodology, a fixed volume of blood-filled skin tissue was first formed by vacuum suction and partially wound with a curved Goubau line which was coated with a 3 mm thick layer of gelatin/glycerin composite. Blood glucose levels were non-invasively determined using a network analyzer. At 4.5 GHz, a near-linear correlation exists between the measured S12 parameters and the blood glucose levels. The measured correlation was highly reproducible and consistent with the measurements obtained using the conventional invasive lancing approach. The findings of this work suggest the feasibility of non-invasive detection of left and right imbalances in the body.