Tracking blood sugar affordably
High school student Celestine Wenardy invented a noninvasive continuous glucometer that works without drawing blood and costs about $63, compared with more than $1,000 for invasive glucometers available in the market.Her glucometer achieves a coefficient of determination of 0.843 using two sensors. One uses interferometry, which involves the relationship between the refractive indices of the skin (and thus the amount of light reflected toward a certain area) and glucose concentration. The second sensor uses thermal technology to sense the correlation between the heat capacity of skin and glucose concentration.
For her efforts to improve glucose monitoring in her native Indonesia, Wenardy won the Virgin Galactic Pioneer Award in the 13-15 age category of the 2019 Google Science Fair. She built the wristwatch-style glucometer at her school, British School Jakarta.
“In the future, I would like to extend the range of substances in the blood this device can measure and market it to the public,” Wenardy told Google.