Maria Valero, an assistant professor of information technology at KSU’s College of Computing and Software Engineering (CCSE) and director of its IoT as a Service Research Group undertook the mission after watching her diabetic father use fingersticks to draw blood for checking glucose levels, according to an article on the school’s website.
Through university funding, Valero and her team developed a non-invasive process for identifying the exact value of blood glucose. It produced 90% accuracy without taking a blood sample. They call the process “GlucoCheck” and it uses light shone through human tissue (in the ear or finger) and a small camera. It captures images on the other side of the tissue, with the light absorption in the images helping to determine blood glucose concentration.
Next steps
Valero and her team filed a provisional patent application in the U.S. to protect their process. The team tested it on nearly 50 people so far, she said. They plan for further assessments to determine how skin pigmentation and thickness affects the process.
“Our pilot study was very successful,” Valero said in the article, which published last month. “We are excited about how this device will help people with diabetes, which affects about one in every 10 people in the United States.”
Valero’s students created a mobile phone application for the process. They also seek to connect GlucoCheck to Amazon’s Alexa.
Additional support came from Hossain Shahriar, associate professor of information technology, and Katherine Ingram, associate professor of exercise science. Ingram currently researchers gestational diabetes risk, while Shahriar focuses on health information technology, data analytics and cybersecurity.
The Journal of Medical Internet Research recently accepted the paper detailing the pilot study. Valero used the data to apply for additional funding.
