10 ms·

Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately

385 points by ndrwnaguib 2y ago

Trasmatta 2y ago
> Currently, diabetics must frequently prick their fingers or rely on invasive wearable patches with micro-needles to track their blood-sugar levels Type 1 diabetic here - for what it's worth, CGMs aren't particularly invasive. At least in comparison to the many many years of finger pricking! But a smart watch solution would be cool. (I actually do get my CGM readings on my smart watch, which is really nice!) I know Apple has also worked on this stuff in the past, but from what I remember the accuracy wasn't good enough to be safe for diabetics. I'd be really curious to see accuracy stats on this in comparison to Dexcom and Freestyle CGMs. I would definitely be excited to use something like this, but for me, the biggest quality of life improvements for me will be continued improvements with closed loop CGM + insulin pump systems.
- Scotrix 2y ago
  Agreed, cool and certainly some improvement but Freestyle is good enough already. Next step for me is more towards the new insulin research which activates only on glucose in the bloodstream (don’t recall how it was called but was here more recently also shared). This sounded more self controlling where it’s hopefully just making sure you have enough of it in your body and don’t need to take care of the rest. Until then, Freestyle with Omnipod Dash in a close loop with iAPS was a game changer for me: Almost no peaks anymore, HBA1c on the level of a non diabetic person… Nevertheless, good luck in productising it and I’ll be certainly trying it once it’s available…
  - smt88 2y ago
    > Freestyle is good enough already In my experience, the quality control isn't very good (some patches will read much more accurately than others) and accuracy isn't that good when you get out of normal ranges. I don't think the "invasive" nature of the Freestyle is a problem at all, but it would be nice to see some innovation on either the cost or the accuracy or both.
    - nahsra 2y ago
      OP lacks imagination for sure. This would reduce infections, prevent compression lows, be more discrete and potentially increase accuracy. In no way would I describe CGM as solved, and this would go a long way towards filling many of the gaps, especially in younger / older / less compliant patient populations.
  - fallsoffbikes 2y ago
    I believe this is a reference to the tech you are talking about. I have a similar take as you: current cgm tech plus closed loop is pretty good. Self activating insulin is the first promising tech I’ve seen in the 40+ years of following the research. https://youtu.be/lVTS_J7Xmxs?si=vemMfo3IbfMlYrUi https://youtu.be/lVTS_J7Xmxs?si=vemMfo3IbfMlYrUi
  - je42 2y ago
    For closed loop better cgms will help. Main points are (fsl2 based): - latency, currently 10min. - accuracy, fine in normal range, but when you have a low blood sugar suddenly the latency spikes a lot. - values when being under the shower too high. - start up time of 60min could be lower. -open up the hardware for any app to read
- mjrpes 2y ago
  Not having to pay $50-100/mo for CGM patches would also be nice.
  - solumunus 2y ago
    Oh there will be a subscription, don’t worry about that.
    - rorytbyrne 2y ago
      But if they want to capture (or create, commercially) the market they’ll probably price it closer to $20 or under.
      - manmal 2y ago
        More likely is a dollar per day for T2 and higher for T1. The differentiator will be non-invasiveness, not price.
        brookst 2y ago
        Then they will get their lunch eaten when smartwatch / ring / etc companies ship it for free. Probably smarter to go for market share with affordable one-time costs and build revenue from conplementsry goods and services.
    - juthen 2y ago
      It's a university research, not in-company. The tech is published.
- IndeterminateR 2y ago
  CGMs are probably going to still be more accurate, so the watch may not be ideal for Type 1, but could be nice for people with pre-diabetes who are trying to optimize their health. I'm also curious how accurate they will be.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    CGMs themselves are still inaccurate compared to needles. And even needle based meters have a lot of different levels of accuracy. A CGM, even once calibrated, may be off by as much as 10%.
    - hx8 2y ago
      My understanding is that CGMs shine at having a large volume of good data. You can see how your biometrics are trending over time much better than the <10/day readings someone with manual testing will receive.
      - scottyeager 2y ago
        It's both. The volume of data is helpful in making adjustments to insulin basal rates or dosing ratio. The instantaneous data is useful for making immediate decisions, either manually or automated, about insulin or sugar intake. Seeing a trend line can be much more useful than a single reading from finger stick too.
    - caseyy 2y ago
      The value is in clinical application though. For closed loop systems, making a clinical decision for insulin dosing every 5 minutes is life-changing, even if the dosage is 10% off. I’d say even with compression lows, most systems are self-balancing enough to produce better results than a self-monitoring person could. Besides, 10% off doesn’t often matter: At 0-70 mg/dl the pump should suspend insulin either way. At 110-600 mg/dl the pump should ensure enough IoB by bolus, increase basal, and monitor either way. In that 70-110mg/dl the 10% MARD kind of matters for clinical decision-making, but not much. 90mg/dl is about as healthy as 81 and 99. Patients are sometimes fussy by this inaccuracy but forget the tremendous benefit of trend indicators, let alone closed loop systems. Both of these have a much much larger positive impact to health than blood glucose being 10% above or below target impacts health negatively. CGM with <=10% MARD, whether in wrist form factor or sensor form, is good enough for treatment. Of course, same as most readers, I have my doubts about this article.
- scottyeager 2y ago
  For me the worst part of current CGMs isn't the needle or the very thin piece of plastic it leaves behind with the probe. Rather, it's the effect on the skin under the patch and the residual adhesive. So from that perspective a watch would be cool. Indeed though, advancements in (affordable) closed loop tech matter more than where the CGM is worn.
  - pneumatic1 2y ago
    Can you say more about the plastic left behind? Polyurethane coating on the cannula?
    - mannyv 2y ago
      Been using a dexcom g7 for a few weeks as a test. Pulling the sensor off can be painful, and leaves behind adhesive residue when I do it. And there's also a bit of inflammation in the area since it sticks a small probe into you, which sits there for 10 days.
      - Projectiboga 2y ago
        Lookup beach tar remover Oil slick is a skin safe tar remover and searching for that using a pummice stone was reccomended on reddit.
    - scottyeager 2y ago
      I mean the probe itself, which appears to be wire encased in plastic. When I said "left behind" I just meant that the probe is placed below the skin as intended, not that anything remains after the sensor is removed. This is the part that would be considered "invasive."
- asyx 2y ago
  Those might be really great for T2 though. I don’t need to know the exact number just a ballpark number to know how I’m doing. Having always had a bad relationship with food, I fall off way too easily without a CGM so for me, those things would be perfect. But also in times where we have the Libre 3 which is so tiny that you legit don’t even notice it, a CGM on your wrist is not worth the loss of accuracy for T1 I guess (assuming your insurance pays for it).
- DavideNL 2y ago
  > but for me, the biggest quality of life improvements for me will be continued improvements with closed loop CGM + insulin pump systems You might find this interesting: "A bi-hormonal fully closed loop system" https://www.inredadiabetic.nl/en/home-english/ https://www.inredadiabetic.nl/en/home-english/
  - manmal 2y ago
    Having talked with T1 diabetics about such systems, the issue is that you don’t want to deplete glycogen stores just for basal management. Because your life might depend on their levels in case of a severe hypo.
    - DavideNL 2y ago
      What exactly do you mean by "you don’t want to deplete glycogen stores" ?
      - sudohackthenews 2y ago
        It sounds like the system would release a hormone known as glucagon when blood sugar levels are too low. Glucagon triggers cellular pathways that break down glycogen stores into glucose molecules, and releases the glucose into the bloodstream. This is opposed to how diabetics handle it normally, by merely eating a sugary snack- however that takes longer to impact blood sugar levels. Depleting these stores could be catastrophic when they actually need a large amount of sugar to be dumped into the bloodstream Disclaimer: not a doctor or biologist
        Projectiboga 2y ago
        Yes T1 here, those body glucose reserves shouldn't be used for regular control. They are reserves for exertion and emergencies. 42 years in, I'm fortunate with a high metabolism and I've always consumed fat as somewhat free extra calories. I use olive oil as a condiment I feel it gives me a standing energy reserve.
- omnicognate 2y ago
  I don't use one or have diabetes but my understanding is that current CGMs measure interstitial glucose levels, which lag blood levels by up to 15 minutes. As a result, I believe those who require accurate spot measurements rather than just overall trends are still recommended to use finger stick tests. In the article, the researcher claims "No other technology can provide this level of precision without direct contact with the bloodstream", so it sounds like they're claiming it's better than existing CGMs in a way that might be clinically relevant. Not sure if that's plausible or whether they are directly measuring blood glucose rather than interstitial.
  - Projectiboga 2y ago
    Type 1 here, a 15 min lag is fine. The constant sampling especially overnight and the multiday graphs are what I love about CGM. I've always been in decent but loose control 6.7 to 7.1 A1C (longer term measurement). After a year w CGM I got to 6.5. Now last checkup I'm at 5.9, this ties my record from my first month on Lantus insulin, never repeated in 19 years until now. Also getting numbers on phone and checking number every 15 min while driving are amazing. The stock software for Dexcom and Freestyle are both abysmal. Both refuse to allow silent mode, Dexcom has a hard 6 hours left on sensor uninteruptable alarm, woke me up at 4 am, coustomer service had nothing to say, so Goodbye. I went back to Freestyle their handheld reader is silencable and I use a third party app called Juggluco for my Android phone. Sorry I've survived 42 years on human insulin I don't want software taking over my life w unsilencable alerts. Anyone w less than 10 or 20 years OK, but my brain has extra backup pathways and I'm still functionable down to 50 (very rare), and I can recognize dimished coordination and the emotional shifts that accompany dips. Plus I have life experience to know my low time of day and to watch w exertion.
- pneumatic1 2y ago
  Not diabetic myself but managing my little kids T1. If we could go from one poke every 10 days to 0 pokes, I am all in. Skeptical of the accuracy as well though especially for someone who is too young to fully participate and not fully hypoglycemic aware.
  - Projectiboga 2y ago
    Low sugar awareness is a learned and developed skill. As blood sugar drops, systems shut down. The issue is that the Frontal Lobe turns off at some point. Thankfully the energy conservation reduces that impact, but once severely low I can answer a myriad of questions wrongly. I reccomend cake-mate frosting tubes used to write on cakes as an emergency prep. That can be squeezed carefully into mouth between teeth and gums and begins a bootstrap process. Another suggestion make the low fun emotionally so please try and hide anger and fear. With the sensor and fairly tight control we haven't needed the cakemate in years now but it's good to have. A Glucagon shot is another thing to keep around too. I use olive oil on my food to have unsaturated fat as a backup nonglycemic energy source. Just be mindful virgin olive oil isn't to be used for cooking, only refined non-virgin is for cooking. Also fyi Walmart has always had affordable diabetic supplies. I use their meter and strips as an extra spare. Their Relion glucose pills are very good too, I keep them everywhere and carry them with me. To equate blood sugar to body mass divide weight in pounds by 4.4 (kilograms by 2), that gives a number for what 100 equals in grams of carbohydrates to better fine tune sliding scale insulin dosages and not overcorrecting lows. Best wishes as it is very stressful for loved ones.
analog31 2y ago
I work in a related field. Non-invasive blood glucose has been a holy grail for decades. It has bankrupted multiple start-ups. It would be exciting to see something that finally works, but my optimism is tempered.
- RachelF 2y ago
  Yes, the article is thin on facts. No mention of the frequency that they use, and how they measure the glucose level, which I'm guessing is some sort of spectral response. I'll take a closer look at the paper in Nature.
  - rkagerer 2y ago
    Direct link (from end of article): https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4
    - RachelF 2y ago
      Thanks for that. The paper is way overhyped. They've just built a meta material near field antenna. Nothing new I can see. There are other papers available via Googling that glucose can be measured at around 4.2GHz. Seems hard to do it reliably, though.
- MBCook 2y ago
  Apple has already been working on this, would love the feature, and has an absolute hell of a lot of cash. They also know how to turn very complicated things into miniaturized production products. If they could provide enough proof that it works the way they say it does, I bet they could find a really good suitor there. And you know the various other health/smart watch companies would love to get one up on Apple, outside of the obvious direct benefit it would provide their customers.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The problem is we don't know if the proqlem is solvable. We get data of course but it needs to be accurate to be useful and that may or may not be possible.
ilaksh 2y ago
I wonder if this micro-radar or whatever could be used for brain-computer interfaces somehow.
- devmor 2y ago
  Radar doesn't seem like it would be particular useful for electrochemical activity.
  - ilaksh 2y ago
    https://healthylongevitychallenge.org/winners/multi-modal-microwave-radar-electroencephalography-based-brain-computer-interfaces-for-non-invasive-functional-imaging-of-the-brain/ https://healthylongevitychallenge.org/winners/multi-modal-mi...
    - devmor 2y ago
      Whoa! That sounds really interesting, I wonder how it works.
paulcole 2y ago
This is 5 years away from being 5 years away.
saidinesh5 2y ago
Even orange pi watch promised something like this... Do we have any updates on it? https://www.notebookcheck.net/Orange-Pi-Watch-D-Pro-New-smartwatch-supposedly-measures-blood-sugar-and-blood-pressure-with-the-precision-of-a-medical-device.821630.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Orange-Pi-Watch-D-Pro-New-smar...
- nahsra 2y ago
  It won’t fly under the radar when this technology actually works. The FDA actually has warned, IIRC, that there’s a bunch of charlatans selling stuff that doesn’t work.
gary_0 2y ago
The explanation of how it works sounds like hand-wavy technobabble from a bad sci-fi thriller. Micro-radar metasurfaces? Amazing that it's actually a real thing.
- pythonguython 2y ago
  It sounds more complicated than it is. A metasurface is almost always just a fancy patch antenna. If you reduce some parameters down, you can really just view it as a resonant circuit. You could design a meta surface in a few minutes in any pcb design software and get it fabricated on low tech PCB fabrication equipment. In this case, they used an array of a specific type of patch antennas (that’s a meta surface) called the complementary split ring resonator. In a sense, all split ring resonators are “micro radar” surfaces, because a split ring resonator is designed to be electrically small compared to the wavelength. The researchers here found that the change in glucose in the bloodstream changes the dielectric properties of the bloodstream, and the resonant characteristics of the complementary split ring resonator change depending on the surrounding dielectric (a dielectric just describes the electrical properties of a material - for instance, a higher electric dielectric constant will slow down the phase velocity of an EM wave, which leads to various measurable effects in an RF system). Looks like great engineering work here, but I’ve always thought the term “metasurface” was foo foo jargon since I first began studying antennas.
rkagerer 2y ago
Sounds exciting, but the fact their prototype is in a wristwatch form factor makes me wonder if it's aiming to be more of a media showpiece to hype investment valuation from those industry partners. Forward looking statements like "maybe we'll make it monitor blood pressure too" don't help. Even at the size of a brick, or without conveniently hiding the power supply off-camera, forgoing needles would still be a huge boon to diabetics. Why not get the concept working and demo some hard stats, then miniaturize?
- nradov 2y ago
  Type-2 diabetes is commonly comorbid with hypertension (similar root causes) so combining both sensors in a single wrist device would be useful for many patients. There are existing wrist blood pressure monitors such as Aktiia. Not as accurate as an arm cuff, but good enough for routine monitoring. https://aktiia.com/ https://aktiia.com/
  - froil 2y ago
    Where can i buy?
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  That's because it's bullshit. To clarify, the actual science they did is interesting (to me at least, as someone not in the field). The paper is linked here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 What is bullshit is the completely unwarranted conclusions in the title or in the quotes in the article. This is classic "science by press release". If you notice in the paper, they didn't do any testing, at all, with actual humans (or animals) and their blood sugar levels. The paper is mainly about the design of this "metasurface" which they claim allows higher resolution and sensitivity of a millimeter-wave radar system. The leap from what they've done to "no more needles for diabetics" is about 100x of "draw the rest of the owl". Again, to emphasize, I'm not denigrating the science they've done. I'm denigrating the hyping of it.
  - sheepscreek 2y ago
mlhpdx 2y ago
No mention of the actual accuracy (and precision) which is critical, obviously. Or did I miss it?
- ars 2y ago
  Maybe one of these has it: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=BuqNOOwAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=BuqNOOwAAAAJ&hl=en Edit: It's here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 But he's clearly spent his entire career on this!
kumarvvr 2y ago
How can an algorithm be "artificial intelligence algorithm"? Does it mean AI models are used for data fitting? Or clustering? For data generated in such low scales, wouldnt statistical methods or procedural methods be sufficient or efficient or both?
- gandalfgreybeer 2y ago
  As an engineer working in the field who has designed both cloud algorithms and on-firmware algorithms, when marketing uses AI, it tends to just be training/data fitting. At best, the most complicated ones tend to be random forests and if any use neural networks, it’s usually just overkill. The answer to your last question is yes, especially when it’s from raw signals. Tbf, there are applications from devices that do use deep learning methods but from experience they are not practical except on very edge cases.
  - jval43 2y ago
    >when marketing uses AI In my experience when marketing wants to use AI, they will. Regardless of whether it is ML, basic statistics or even just a few if-else blocks. It used to be the way you describe up to about 2-3 years ago, now the term is meaningless.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Hard_Space 2y ago
  If you hard-code effective learned distributions from a trained model, I suppose that could be described as an 'AI algorithm', even though the final output is a flat algorithm.
- bregma 2y ago
  In modern common usage both the terms "AI" and "algorithm" are just newspeak for "a computer does something" so combining the two into a single phrase just superlatively multiplies the value, like how using a double negative emphasizes how very much more negative something is. In the middle ages the term might have been "miraculous" and it could also be well served just by sampling Magnus Pike exclaiming "SCIENCE!".
ars 2y ago
This title needs that missing exclamation mark. I read it straight as a single sentence and wondered when people used needles on their wrist.
jimrandomh 2y ago
This is yet another in a long line of glucose-measurement devices designed to sell to unsophisticated research grantmaking agencies, rather than to diabetics. Making a device that "measures" blood sugar in a watch form factor is easy, and many research groups have done so. Making one that's accurate enough to compete with the CGMs that are already on the market is a different matter entirely.
- mmooss 2y ago
  What about this research indicates to you that it doesn't address the accuracy issue?
  - morganherlocker 2y ago
    > Shaker said. “No other technology can provide this level of precision without direct contact with the bloodstream.” The existing alternatives do have access to the bloodstream.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      How does that indicate that they didn't address the accuracy of their technology, as the GGP claims? > The existing alternatives do have access to the bloodstream. So? Who says otherwise? People don't want invasive tests that have direct contact with their bloodstream.
      - morganherlocker 2y ago
        If you're type 1 diabetic, accuracy is paramount, especially in a closed loop insulin pump setup. Even with access to the bloodstream, existing CGMs leave plenty of room for improvement that would directly improve quality of life a lot more than the annoyance of applying the sensor under the skin.
        mmooss 2y ago
        > accuracy is paramount Who says that's not addressed by this technology? > directly improve quality of life a lot more than the annoyance of applying the sensor under the skin How annoying is it? They don't cut a hole and insert it. How can you say how much it would improve the quality of life? I don't see where all these assumptions about this technology come from.
whatnotests2 2y ago
Remarkable work! I was part of a team in 2014-2016 that tried using silicon micro needles layered with polymers in order to filter the interstitial fluid's glucose. Unfortunately it was difficult to calibrate for all the variables. We could have two sensors from the same silicon wager on the same person at the same time and get two different readings. Hats off to these researchers, who went a different direction. Better health really can start with glucose monitoring for everyone. Because we could all learn about sugar's effect on our bodies.
potamic 2y ago
They seem to be using radio waves instead of optical? Do radio waves penetrate the body or do they hypothesize that there will be changes on the surface of the skin due to blood sugar/pressure?
- pythonguython 2y ago
  Yes, it is sub optical RF sensing. The important factor here is that the gluclose blood capacitively couples to small sensing antennas. The sensing antennas are resonant elements, whose exact resonance changes depending on the surrounding environment, in this case gluclose in the blood. You can then transmit an RF signal to the antenna, then record the signal reflected from the antenna’s port to estimate the gluclose level.
- toast0 2y ago
  > Do radio waves penetrate the body Generally, yes. Attenuation varies by frequency, and I guess blood sugar and pressure, though.
azinman2 2y ago
> “We have a minimum viable product that’s already being used in clinical trials, and while there’s more work to be done, we’re much closer to a full marketable device,” Shaker said. I see this a lot. People seem to ignore the “viable” part of MVP. If there’s more work to be done to make it a full marketable device, it isn’t viable in its current stage. I wish them luck.
vlovich123 2y ago
> and microcontrollers, which process the radar signals using artificial intelligence algorithms So glad we've rebranded primitive ML and basic control mechanisms as AI.
- winter_blue 2y ago
  Or maybe just a signal processor is being rebranded as AI. Soon a Fast Fourier Transform will be rebranded as AI as well.
- cdmckay 2y ago
  Wasn’t ML always considered AI?
  - consp 2y ago
    I've never seen ML been called AI until the past few years. And this is most likely not even ML but just fancy signal processing.
- raincole 2y ago
  Except AI has always meant quite primitive things. AI predates C. Actually AI predates lisp: > IPL was used to implement several early artificial intelligence programs, also by the same authors: the Logic Theorist (1956), the General Problem Solver (1957), and their computer chess program NSS (1958). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Langu...
- bregma 2y ago
  I had the same complaint over 20 years ago when the phrase "game AI" came into widespread use to describe a computer opponent. Now that we have an entire generation raised on the concept that anything a computer does is "AI" is it surprising everything a computer does is termed "AI"?
caseyy 2y ago
This all sounds exciting, and good luck to all researchers earnestly working on it. If RF blood content diagnostics become possible, blood glucose sensing would be just the start. But as for this guy and his invention, don’t forget that in clinical setting, Theranos has shown more evidence of their product working. And GlucoWatch, a similar idea two decades ago, was FDA-approved and made it to market though still wasn’t clinically useful due to poor accuracy. Then, I’m not even talking about the charlatan cottage industry around glucose sensing watches, nor am I talking about how CGMs are a (generally) solved problem in diabetes. Let’s wait for some clinical trials of the applied blood glucose sensing before we pop the champagne? It quite likely won’t happen, welcome as that invention would be.
- consp 2y ago
  > CGMs are a (generally) solved problem in diabetes. Good to know I'm not generally then.
- pythonguython 2y ago
  According to the paper, this worked because the dielectric change from all other blood diagnostics was negligible, allowing glucose to be measured. Gluclose in blood is around 80 mg/dL. It may be possible to measure other blood chemistry metrics that are similar in concentration at other frequencies, but there’s a lot of blood tests, many of which would probably be impossible - like white blood cell count, anything enzymatic, something whose concentration is measured in ug/dL, or something that has no effect on dielectric properties of the blood. I wouldn’t expect to see a whole blood panel via wearable radar anytime soon, but we may get a few more tests from RF sensing.
felipevb 2y ago
I'm super curious about how far Dexcom and Abbott's research departments are with developing these technologies. It could be a (partial) disruption for them. Also - flashback to Rockley Photonics ($RKLY) - and their years-long promise of non-invasive glucose monitoring.
throwaway_ab 2y ago
I wonder what other health measurements could be obtained with this technology? Sending radar through the wrist seems like a method that could observe much more information, although I am not sure which.
- elric 2y ago
  Perhaps common ailments such as iron insuffiency (anaemia), excess bilirubin, heck maybe even cholesterol?
exceptione 2y ago
What I miss in the paper is any accuracy figure for glucose sensing. If this is an alternative to needles, how would the measurements compare? That is the first question one should ask. I fear we can assume that, although the approach might be novel, it can't replace needles for accurate measurement. But maybe I am overlooking the performance comparison.
- DavideNL 2y ago
  Yea, it might perhaps be described more detailed in the mentioned paper (i haven't checked it yet.): https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 EDIT: No, i don't think it's mentioned...
- bobmcnamara 2y ago
  They claim 90-some percent
- croes 2y ago
  Seems like it's nowhere near usable for glucose sensing https://chaos.social/@jaseg/113777015012964743 https://chaos.social/@jaseg/113777015012964743
SteveVeilStream 2y ago
This sounds great for the problem they are trying to solve but it also sounds like it could be useful for a lot of other interesting applications. I would assume you could put the same sensor on a plastic pipe and infer details about the liquid inside. If I was this team, I might look at how to commercialize this tech for industrial process control in parallel with the slow process of commercializing it for medical purposes. "The system’s key components are a radar chip, which sends and receives signals through the body, an engineered “meta-surface”, which helps focus these signals for better accuracy, and microcontrollers, which process the radar signals using artificial intelligence algorithms. The algorithms improve the accuracy and reliability of the readings by learning from the data over time."
spyder 2y ago
Looks like it's using mm-wave radar technology to detect changes of the dielectric properties of solutions with different levels of glucose. There is also a paper from them doing it with the Google's Project Sali dev kit, the radar that was mostly demonstrated with gesture recognition, but looks like it's useful for other things too like this. They also show it can be also used to detect glucose levels in drinks too like Coke vs diet Coke. Besides the current one posted, they have multiple other publications about the topic: Using Project Sali back in 2018: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=BuqNOOwAAAAJ&citation_for_view=BuqNOOwAAAAJ:GnPB-g6toBAC https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl... This one is also nice detailed one: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/3/385 https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/3/385 and looks like the current one is about improving this technology with enhanced signal-to-noise ratio.
- richarme 2y ago
  Nit: Google's project was called Soli.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > Looks like it's using mm-wave radar technology to detect changes of the dielectric properties of solutions with different levels of glucose. I wonder if this is actually a viable path to detecting blood glucose. Wouldn't it be sensitive to other substances that affect the dielectric properties of a solution as complex as blood?
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
We need to find the api endpoints of the body somehow.
deleted 2y ago
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vinni2 2y ago
Wonder what happened to so called smart insulin https://bristol.ac.uk/news/2018/august/ziylo-deal.html https://bristol.ac.uk/news/2018/august/ziylo-deal.html
- pneumatic1 2y ago
  https://www.biocentury.com/article/653947/science-spotlight-novo-s-glucose-sensing-insulin-two-bacterial-immunotherapies-and-more https://www.biocentury.com/article/653947/science-spotlight-... NNC2215 explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVTS_J7Xmxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVTS_J7Xmxs
  - vinni2 2y ago
    I saw this video but the acquisition happened 6 years ago but not much progress after that.
pakitan 2y ago
There is a company that (allegedly) already produces such a device: https://www.knowlabs.co/ https://www.knowlabs.co/ I've looked over the studies/tests they've done and they look decent, though the accuracy is not that great.
- wsabihi 2y ago
  I initially got excited about this (and know people who would really love this to exist), but after a bit of digging, I am convinced that this is likely a scam. This report explains why it is: https://whitediamondresearch.com/research/know-labs-is-an-obvious-medical-device-scam-we-call-it-theranos-retarded-cousin/ https://whitediamondresearch.com/research/know-labs-is-an-ob.... You could also look at the stock economics to see that this company has not behaved like one with a bright future.
  - pakitan 2y ago
    Yeah, the stock price made me suspicious but I figured that it might be due to the not-so-great accuracy plus a lack of moat - even if it worked, you'd see a cheap copy on AliExpress in 2 weeks. I didn't see the report before though, so yeah, I'd agree it smells like scam. Especially when you see the CEO dabbles in NFTs
looopTools 2y ago
If it has sufficient accuracy then this could be cool. But I want to see it battle tested before raising my arms to high
tpoacher 2y ago
A prof of mine back in Oxford told us a story how he invented a similar noninvasive blood glucose monitoring technique, shown to work, patented it, patent bought by big pharma and silenced. I'm more than convinced we had this tech ages ago but it was not profitable to deploy it. Now either relevant patents are finally expiring or the market has changed enough to allow such players to enter.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Do you have a link to his patent? You should be able to find it by his name. But the hurdle today isn't in the physical sensing technology, it's how to detect an accurate signal from extremely noisy data. Patents aren't the main blocker -- nobody has built this at all in a way that is accurate enough. And Apple has been trying hard, and they have nothing to do with Big Pharma.
- lolc 2y ago
  I'm sceptical of this story. This is a huge market and it was a huge market 20 years ago. I participated in studies with prototype devices to measure blood glucose and nobody I talked to mentioned patent blocks.
justinl33 2y ago
The comparison to weather satellites is misleading and oversells this technology. Weather radar works by detecting water droplets at known atmospheric heights - it's a fundamentally different problem than trying to measure glucose concentrations in blood through layers of tissue. The real breakthrough here isn't the radar tech (which has existed for years), it's the machine learning pipeline that can extract meaningful glucose data from extremely noisy radar returns.
- DoctorOetker 2y ago
  I don't believe the claim is radio echolocation, but radio spectroscopy. I didn't read the paper yet, but I predict from the comments in this HN thread, that the proposed system is essentially a dielectric spectroscopy setup optimized for glucose detection (or any number of proxy byproducts/complexes/etc..) Check this wikipedia page for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_spectroscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_spectroscopy Look at the picture on the right, from typically lower to higher frequencies there is the motion response of ions, the reorientation response of molecules with a dipole moment, the excitation of vibrational modes in a molecule and the electronic excitation of electrons switching orbitals... EDIT: since I have not read the article, I do not vouch for its authenticity (above my paygrade)
WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
Wake me when I, a consumer, can place an order for one. I keep hearing about such devices year in and year out, with none for sale. I feel like I will just die of old age or as a World War 3 casualty way before I can actually buy one.
barbegal 2y ago
There's far too many variables in skin for any non invasive techniques to work reliably in measuring blood glucose levels. The patches work fine and are highly accurate. The real next innovation is implanting devices inside the skin but the miniaturisation of the energy source to do this isn't quite there yet.
algorithmsRcool 2y ago
I'm happy at the prospect of more accurate readings. But honestly, the Libre 3 is already simply excellent and I would personally prefer the back of the arm location to more wrist based tech. I wear a traditional (Citizen) mechanical watch, because I hated needing to charge a smartwatch. I had some issues with the Libre 2 sensor getting knocked off or loosening after a few days in the shower. But the libre 3 is smaller than a US quarter coin and lasts 15 days and doesn't snag on anything. Will this watch exceed that? Because if not, then I'm not looking to switch. Lastly for diabetics or pre-diabetics that are only using finger sticks, I CANNOT stress enough how important a CGM is to your health. You learn so much about how your body actually works with certian foods rather than low frequency (but somewhat more accurate) finger sticks and that information dropped my A1C like a rock in just a few months. Tell your older relatives also. These are life saving devices.
trimethylpurine 2y ago
This article is from 2014 and it should be noted as such. Looking at the comments, it's clear people have been misled by the presentation of this article to think this is an emerging technology rather than an old and inappropriate application of one. For others reading; this is about a small radar technology, having nothing to do with research in the detection of blood glucose whatsoever.
- freedomben 2y ago
  > This article is from 2014 How do you know? The date on the article says October 29, 2024
  - trimethylpurine 2y ago
    Well, I can agree that now the date on the article is 10/29/2024. When I posted this comment, it was dated 2014. I do see that internet archive has copies of the site that have the 2024 date but not from yesterday. Maybe a dead cmos battery or other time sync error changed the date temporarily yesterday. I don't have any other explanation, but I do respectfully withdraw my former opinion about the article.
    - croes 2y ago
      A simple typo?
      - trimethylpurine 2y ago
        I assumed that web servers handle date variables in this age. But you're absolutely right, we can't assume that.
bkraz 2y ago
For anyone interested in noninvasive glucose sensing, I'd highly recommend https://www.nivglucose.com/The%20Pursuit%20of%20Noninvasive%20Glucose%209th%20Edition.pdf https://www.nivglucose.com/The%20Pursuit%20of%20Noninvasive%... RF-based approaches have the problem that they are not specific to glucose. A molecule of glucose absorbs infrared light at specific wavelengths due to its size and types of bonds. It does not have specific absorption of radio frequencies. In this paper, researchers measured glucose in pure water at concentrations 100X physiological levels. I'd like to see this work with whole blood or a tissue phantom, or measure glucose independently from any other solute.
Beijinger 2y ago
Sorry to break the party. A buddy of mine is deeply skeptical, and he is one of the few with a decent amount of peer-reviewed publications about non-invasive blood glucose measurement. The idea to use "Radar near-field sensing" is everything but new and nothing has ever come out of it. "Breakthroughs" in this field are a dime a dozen: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/liom-cracks-holy-grail-non-221500540.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/liom-cracks-holy-grail-non-22... My buddy is one of the few guys that has a sound (no pun intended) technology that might work. But future will tell. I won't give a link. Yes, the company secured funding.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  This is "my uncle who works at Nintendo said Sony sucks" level information to anyone but you. I do agree on one part regardless of any of that though... I'm at the point of waiting for the one who actually sells me said device instead of the one that says they'll soon be able to.
  - Beijinger 2y ago
    At this state, they are likely able to do this. Not small enough for your watch but a working stationary device that can RELIABLY monitor your blood sugar. And with blood sugar I don't mean the skin prick test. If people claim they compared to the skin prick test and "it works" they have no idea what they are talking about. You have to compare venereal blood glucose with measured blood glucose and use the Clarke error grid to show what you are doing. And yes, skin color or skin temperature (fever!) does not matter for his measurement. I once submitted an SBIR grant for this project, but have no involvement anymore with this project. The NIH found this approach "highly innovative" but thought it can not be realized bc the technology is "prohibitive expensive". I assume they did not really read the proposal. I explicitly wrote that, while such a device costs 50k on the market, a slimmed down version produced in quantities would cost a few hundred dollars. They just had a short look at the approach, googled the hardware behind it, and rejected it. An idiot and google is a very dangerous combination!
    - zamadatix 2y ago
sowbug 2y ago
Slightly OT, but just last night I finished a 15-day Dexcom Stelo CGM session. If you can afford the $99, I highly recommend it. There is a world of difference between an intellectual understanding of blood glucose and actually witnessing your body maintaining exquisite control over a system dependent on food, exercise, stress, time of day, and the idiosyncrasies of your individual insulin response.
- ra7 2y ago
  I’ve been looking to try an CGM to see how all those factors affect my blood sugar. Is Dexcom Stelo the best available OTC? How do you like the analytics in the app?
  - sowbug 2y ago
    I didn't look at the competition. I knew the Dexcom brand because my friends have had good experiences with the G series, so the Stelo was an easy impulse purchase. I'm neither diabetic nor prediabetic, so I'm not a good representative of those audiences. For someone glucose-curious like me, the Stelo is just right. The app provides a slightly laggy real-time graph of measurements (collected every 5 minutes and reported every 15 minutes). It uses some heuristics to identify rising/falling events, and it'll notify you for the steeper cases (but I'm not sure about hypoglycemic event notifications, as I had a couple of those while sleeping and found out only when I woke up). On Android, it uses the Health Connect hub to sync some health data with other apps. It provides a rudimentary event-log function to add meal, exercise, and FYI notations. You'll also get a daily time-in-range wrap-up. The more interesting analytics are in clarity.dexcom.com, which is a website that visualizes data that the app is constantly pushing, with a couple-hour lag. There you will find more graphs, tables that group measurements by day and hour, and various expected calculations (average, standard deviation, CV, calculated GMI). And you'll also find the all-important export to CSV button, which gives you all the sensor data. Using that I was able to import everything to Google Sheets, where I did a linear regression with finger-prick measurements to ascertain the sensor's (mild) deviation. The Stelo feature set is clearly designed to provide all the data eventually, but not quickly enough to be useful for diabetics who need real-time info for glucose management. That's how they'll continue segmenting the Stelo and G7 audiences. I have no problem with that; if OTC GCM cost continues to drop, and they become as prevalent as annual lipid/metabolic labs, I could see the incidence of lifestyle-attributable T2D dropping, which would obviously have massive benefits to society.
tlubinski 2y ago
We - at DiaMonTech - are working on non-invasive glucose monitoring for over a decade now. It's a hard and complex problem and as long as clinical data is missing, I'm very sceptical. We just reached (in a clinical trial) a comparable accuracy as early-stage invasive devices that got FDA approved with a shoe-box-sized device and we still have some work to do. The pre-print of our publication is here: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5289491/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5289491/v1 I'm excited to see new developments but in this case, I'm not sure this will reach the market anytime soon.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
  I was actually thinking about your product when venting my frustrations elsewhere in the thread. Your site was mentioning elsewhere that you had a working shoebox-sized device which, "due to its size", was "only targeted at hospitals". Man, you have no idea. I'd gladly buy a shoebox-sized thing. No finger pricking and no test strips to buy is the king. It could be 4U rackmount thing for all I care, as long as it was noninvasive and accurate.
  - tlubinski 2y ago
    It's not approved yet anyway. But if you are ever in Berlin, let me know and I'll give you a tour.
- bob_theslob646 2y ago
  Why do you think that this will not reach the market anytime soon?
  - tlubinski 2y ago
    Because the engineers of the University of Waterloo haven't shown any clinical data yet.
nis0s 2y ago
If I generally know what my levels are on a daily basis as both my diet and my routine is constant, then I don’t need a device. But I guess some people do. It’s also a little presumptuous to believe that someone would want to wear a bulky medical device for an easily manageable and non-life threatening condition all the time. If not wearing a medical device doesn’t kill you, then why do you need to wear it? Form factor and comfort is important.
typon 2y ago
This is one technology that I've been waiting for for over a decade. Apple apparently hasn't given up on it, despite working on it for 10+ years as well. I am hopeful it can be solved because diabetes is one of the biggest killers on Earth today.
Projectiboga 2y ago
Wow just read the press release, they claim it is under clinical trials while they keep refining the engineering. They are using radar and claim it is actually an improvement over current tech. My interest is peaked with my being a type 1 diabetic w 42 years on RNA derived insulin and 42 years since starting fingerstick blood glucose tests since Febuary 1983. I've been on CGM for around 5 or 6 years now.
deleted 2y ago
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croes 2y ago
>The press release: "[our stuff] senses glucose levels for diabetics more accurately than ever before" >The actual research: basically a better antenna that can distinguish between distilled water and a ~25000 mg/dL glucose solution absent any other factors. For context: At around 500 mg/dL you're dead. https://chaos.social/@jaseg/113777015012964743 https://chaos.social/@jaseg/113777015012964743
throwaway-blaze 2y ago
Not T1 or T2 but wore CGM patches for a month. Amazing insight into how your body reacts to foods and food + exercise. Even if this tech isn't accurate enough at first for people who need to manage a disease, it could be amazing for anyone interested in health optimization.

385 points by ndrwnaguib 2y ago

> Currently, diabetics must frequently prick their fingers or rely on invasive wearable patches with micro-needles to track their blood-sugar levels Type 1 diabetic here - for what it's worth, CGMs aren't particularly invasive. At least in comparison to the many many years of finger pricking! But a smart watch solution would be cool. (I actually do get my CGM readings on my smart watch, which is really nice!) I know Apple has also worked on this stuff in the past, but from what I remember the accuracy wasn't good enough to be safe for diabetics. I'd be really curious to see accuracy stats on this in comparison to Dexcom and Freestyle CGMs. I would definitely be excited to use something like this, but for me, the biggest quality of life improvements for me will be continued improvements with closed loop CGM + insulin pump systems.

Scotrix 2y ago
Agreed, cool and certainly some improvement but Freestyle is good enough already. Next step for me is more towards the new insulin research which activates only on glucose in the bloodstream (don’t recall how it was called but was here more recently also shared). This sounded more self controlling where it’s hopefully just making sure you have enough of it in your body and don’t need to take care of the rest. Until then, Freestyle with Omnipod Dash in a close loop with iAPS was a game changer for me: Almost no peaks anymore, HBA1c on the level of a non diabetic person… Nevertheless, good luck in productising it and I’ll be certainly trying it once it’s available…
- smt88 2y ago
  > Freestyle is good enough already In my experience, the quality control isn't very good (some patches will read much more accurately than others) and accuracy isn't that good when you get out of normal ranges. I don't think the "invasive" nature of the Freestyle is a problem at all, but it would be nice to see some innovation on either the cost or the accuracy or both.
  - nahsra 2y ago
    OP lacks imagination for sure. This would reduce infections, prevent compression lows, be more discrete and potentially increase accuracy. In no way would I describe CGM as solved, and this would go a long way towards filling many of the gaps, especially in younger / older / less compliant patient populations.
- fallsoffbikes 2y ago
  I believe this is a reference to the tech you are talking about. I have a similar take as you: current cgm tech plus closed loop is pretty good. Self activating insulin is the first promising tech I’ve seen in the 40+ years of following the research. https://youtu.be/lVTS_J7Xmxs?si=vemMfo3IbfMlYrUi https://youtu.be/lVTS_J7Xmxs?si=vemMfo3IbfMlYrUi
- je42 2y ago
  For closed loop better cgms will help. Main points are (fsl2 based): - latency, currently 10min. - accuracy, fine in normal range, but when you have a low blood sugar suddenly the latency spikes a lot. - values when being under the shower too high. - start up time of 60min could be lower. -open up the hardware for any app to read
mjrpes 2y ago
Not having to pay $50-100/mo for CGM patches would also be nice.
- solumunus 2y ago
  Oh there will be a subscription, don’t worry about that.
  - rorytbyrne 2y ago
    But if they want to capture (or create, commercially) the market they’ll probably price it closer to $20 or under.
    - manmal 2y ago
      More likely is a dollar per day for T2 and higher for T1. The differentiator will be non-invasiveness, not price.
      - brookst 2y ago
        Then they will get their lunch eaten when smartwatch / ring / etc companies ship it for free. Probably smarter to go for market share with affordable one-time costs and build revenue from conplementsry goods and services.
  - juthen 2y ago
    It's a university research, not in-company. The tech is published.
IndeterminateR 2y ago
CGMs are probably going to still be more accurate, so the watch may not be ideal for Type 1, but could be nice for people with pre-diabetes who are trying to optimize their health. I'm also curious how accurate they will be.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  CGMs themselves are still inaccurate compared to needles. And even needle based meters have a lot of different levels of accuracy. A CGM, even once calibrated, may be off by as much as 10%.
  - hx8 2y ago
    My understanding is that CGMs shine at having a large volume of good data. You can see how your biometrics are trending over time much better than the <10/day readings someone with manual testing will receive.
    - scottyeager 2y ago
      It's both. The volume of data is helpful in making adjustments to insulin basal rates or dosing ratio. The instantaneous data is useful for making immediate decisions, either manually or automated, about insulin or sugar intake. Seeing a trend line can be much more useful than a single reading from finger stick too.
  - caseyy 2y ago
    The value is in clinical application though. For closed loop systems, making a clinical decision for insulin dosing every 5 minutes is life-changing, even if the dosage is 10% off. I’d say even with compression lows, most systems are self-balancing enough to produce better results than a self-monitoring person could. Besides, 10% off doesn’t often matter: At 0-70 mg/dl the pump should suspend insulin either way. At 110-600 mg/dl the pump should ensure enough IoB by bolus, increase basal, and monitor either way. In that 70-110mg/dl the 10% MARD kind of matters for clinical decision-making, but not much. 90mg/dl is about as healthy as 81 and 99. Patients are sometimes fussy by this inaccuracy but forget the tremendous benefit of trend indicators, let alone closed loop systems. Both of these have a much much larger positive impact to health than blood glucose being 10% above or below target impacts health negatively. CGM with <=10% MARD, whether in wrist form factor or sensor form, is good enough for treatment. Of course, same as most readers, I have my doubts about this article.
scottyeager 2y ago
For me the worst part of current CGMs isn't the needle or the very thin piece of plastic it leaves behind with the probe. Rather, it's the effect on the skin under the patch and the residual adhesive. So from that perspective a watch would be cool. Indeed though, advancements in (affordable) closed loop tech matter more than where the CGM is worn.
- pneumatic1 2y ago
  Can you say more about the plastic left behind? Polyurethane coating on the cannula?
  - mannyv 2y ago
    Been using a dexcom g7 for a few weeks as a test. Pulling the sensor off can be painful, and leaves behind adhesive residue when I do it. And there's also a bit of inflammation in the area since it sticks a small probe into you, which sits there for 10 days.
    - Projectiboga 2y ago
      Lookup beach tar remover Oil slick is a skin safe tar remover and searching for that using a pummice stone was reccomended on reddit.
  - scottyeager 2y ago
    I mean the probe itself, which appears to be wire encased in plastic. When I said "left behind" I just meant that the probe is placed below the skin as intended, not that anything remains after the sensor is removed. This is the part that would be considered "invasive."
asyx 2y ago
Those might be really great for T2 though. I don’t need to know the exact number just a ballpark number to know how I’m doing. Having always had a bad relationship with food, I fall off way too easily without a CGM so for me, those things would be perfect. But also in times where we have the Libre 3 which is so tiny that you legit don’t even notice it, a CGM on your wrist is not worth the loss of accuracy for T1 I guess (assuming your insurance pays for it).
DavideNL 2y ago
> but for me, the biggest quality of life improvements for me will be continued improvements with closed loop CGM + insulin pump systems You might find this interesting: "A bi-hormonal fully closed loop system" https://www.inredadiabetic.nl/en/home-english/ https://www.inredadiabetic.nl/en/home-english/
- manmal 2y ago
  Having talked with T1 diabetics about such systems, the issue is that you don’t want to deplete glycogen stores just for basal management. Because your life might depend on their levels in case of a severe hypo.
  - DavideNL 2y ago
    What exactly do you mean by "you don’t want to deplete glycogen stores" ?
    - sudohackthenews 2y ago
      It sounds like the system would release a hormone known as glucagon when blood sugar levels are too low. Glucagon triggers cellular pathways that break down glycogen stores into glucose molecules, and releases the glucose into the bloodstream. This is opposed to how diabetics handle it normally, by merely eating a sugary snack- however that takes longer to impact blood sugar levels. Depleting these stores could be catastrophic when they actually need a large amount of sugar to be dumped into the bloodstream Disclaimer: not a doctor or biologist
      - Projectiboga 2y ago
        Yes T1 here, those body glucose reserves shouldn't be used for regular control. They are reserves for exertion and emergencies. 42 years in, I'm fortunate with a high metabolism and I've always consumed fat as somewhat free extra calories. I use olive oil as a condiment I feel it gives me a standing energy reserve.
omnicognate 2y ago
I don't use one or have diabetes but my understanding is that current CGMs measure interstitial glucose levels, which lag blood levels by up to 15 minutes. As a result, I believe those who require accurate spot measurements rather than just overall trends are still recommended to use finger stick tests. In the article, the researcher claims "No other technology can provide this level of precision without direct contact with the bloodstream", so it sounds like they're claiming it's better than existing CGMs in a way that might be clinically relevant. Not sure if that's plausible or whether they are directly measuring blood glucose rather than interstitial.
- Projectiboga 2y ago
  Type 1 here, a 15 min lag is fine. The constant sampling especially overnight and the multiday graphs are what I love about CGM. I've always been in decent but loose control 6.7 to 7.1 A1C (longer term measurement). After a year w CGM I got to 6.5. Now last checkup I'm at 5.9, this ties my record from my first month on Lantus insulin, never repeated in 19 years until now. Also getting numbers on phone and checking number every 15 min while driving are amazing. The stock software for Dexcom and Freestyle are both abysmal. Both refuse to allow silent mode, Dexcom has a hard 6 hours left on sensor uninteruptable alarm, woke me up at 4 am, coustomer service had nothing to say, so Goodbye. I went back to Freestyle their handheld reader is silencable and I use a third party app called Juggluco for my Android phone. Sorry I've survived 42 years on human insulin I don't want software taking over my life w unsilencable alerts. Anyone w less than 10 or 20 years OK, but my brain has extra backup pathways and I'm still functionable down to 50 (very rare), and I can recognize dimished coordination and the emotional shifts that accompany dips. Plus I have life experience to know my low time of day and to watch w exertion.
pneumatic1 2y ago
Not diabetic myself but managing my little kids T1. If we could go from one poke every 10 days to 0 pokes, I am all in. Skeptical of the accuracy as well though especially for someone who is too young to fully participate and not fully hypoglycemic aware.
- Projectiboga 2y ago
  Low sugar awareness is a learned and developed skill. As blood sugar drops, systems shut down. The issue is that the Frontal Lobe turns off at some point. Thankfully the energy conservation reduces that impact, but once severely low I can answer a myriad of questions wrongly. I reccomend cake-mate frosting tubes used to write on cakes as an emergency prep. That can be squeezed carefully into mouth between teeth and gums and begins a bootstrap process. Another suggestion make the low fun emotionally so please try and hide anger and fear. With the sensor and fairly tight control we haven't needed the cakemate in years now but it's good to have. A Glucagon shot is another thing to keep around too. I use olive oil on my food to have unsaturated fat as a backup nonglycemic energy source. Just be mindful virgin olive oil isn't to be used for cooking, only refined non-virgin is for cooking. Also fyi Walmart has always had affordable diabetic supplies. I use their meter and strips as an extra spare. Their Relion glucose pills are very good too, I keep them everywhere and carry them with me. To equate blood sugar to body mass divide weight in pounds by 4.4 (kilograms by 2), that gives a number for what 100 equals in grams of carbohydrates to better fine tune sliding scale insulin dosages and not overcorrecting lows. Best wishes as it is very stressful for loved ones.

analog31 2y ago

I work in a related field. Non-invasive blood glucose has been a holy grail for decades. It has bankrupted multiple start-ups. It would be exciting to see something that finally works, but my optimism is tempered.

RachelF 2y ago
Yes, the article is thin on facts. No mention of the frequency that they use, and how they measure the glucose level, which I'm guessing is some sort of spectral response. I'll take a closer look at the paper in Nature.
- rkagerer 2y ago
  Direct link (from end of article): https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4
  - RachelF 2y ago
    Thanks for that. The paper is way overhyped. They've just built a meta material near field antenna. Nothing new I can see. There are other papers available via Googling that glucose can be measured at around 4.2GHz. Seems hard to do it reliably, though.
MBCook 2y ago
Apple has already been working on this, would love the feature, and has an absolute hell of a lot of cash. They also know how to turn very complicated things into miniaturized production products. If they could provide enough proof that it works the way they say it does, I bet they could find a really good suitor there. And you know the various other health/smart watch companies would love to get one up on Apple, outside of the obvious direct benefit it would provide their customers.
- bluGill 2y ago
  The problem is we don't know if the proqlem is solvable. We get data of course but it needs to be accurate to be useful and that may or may not be possible.

ilaksh 2y ago

I wonder if this micro-radar or whatever could be used for brain-computer interfaces somehow.

devmor 2y ago
Radar doesn't seem like it would be particular useful for electrochemical activity.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  https://healthylongevitychallenge.org/winners/multi-modal-microwave-radar-electroencephalography-based-brain-computer-interfaces-for-non-invasive-functional-imaging-of-the-brain/ https://healthylongevitychallenge.org/winners/multi-modal-mi...
  - devmor 2y ago
    Whoa! That sounds really interesting, I wonder how it works.

paulcole 2y ago

This is 5 years away from being 5 years away.

saidinesh5 2y ago

Even orange pi watch promised something like this... Do we have any updates on it? https://www.notebookcheck.net/Orange-Pi-Watch-D-Pro-New-smartwatch-supposedly-measures-blood-sugar-and-blood-pressure-with-the-precision-of-a-medical-device.821630.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Orange-Pi-Watch-D-Pro-New-smar...

nahsra 2y ago
It won’t fly under the radar when this technology actually works. The FDA actually has warned, IIRC, that there’s a bunch of charlatans selling stuff that doesn’t work.

gary_0 2y ago

The explanation of how it works sounds like hand-wavy technobabble from a bad sci-fi thriller. Micro-radar metasurfaces? Amazing that it's actually a real thing.

pythonguython 2y ago
It sounds more complicated than it is. A metasurface is almost always just a fancy patch antenna. If you reduce some parameters down, you can really just view it as a resonant circuit. You could design a meta surface in a few minutes in any pcb design software and get it fabricated on low tech PCB fabrication equipment. In this case, they used an array of a specific type of patch antennas (that’s a meta surface) called the complementary split ring resonator. In a sense, all split ring resonators are “micro radar” surfaces, because a split ring resonator is designed to be electrically small compared to the wavelength. The researchers here found that the change in glucose in the bloodstream changes the dielectric properties of the bloodstream, and the resonant characteristics of the complementary split ring resonator change depending on the surrounding dielectric (a dielectric just describes the electrical properties of a material - for instance, a higher electric dielectric constant will slow down the phase velocity of an EM wave, which leads to various measurable effects in an RF system). Looks like great engineering work here, but I’ve always thought the term “metasurface” was foo foo jargon since I first began studying antennas.

rkagerer 2y ago

Sounds exciting, but the fact their prototype is in a wristwatch form factor makes me wonder if it's aiming to be more of a media showpiece to hype investment valuation from those industry partners. Forward looking statements like "maybe we'll make it monitor blood pressure too" don't help. Even at the size of a brick, or without conveniently hiding the power supply off-camera, forgoing needles would still be a huge boon to diabetics. Why not get the concept working and demo some hard stats, then miniaturize?

nradov 2y ago
Type-2 diabetes is commonly comorbid with hypertension (similar root causes) so combining both sensors in a single wrist device would be useful for many patients. There are existing wrist blood pressure monitors such as Aktiia. Not as accurate as an arm cuff, but good enough for routine monitoring. https://aktiia.com/ https://aktiia.com/
- froil 2y ago
  Where can i buy?
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
That's because it's bullshit. To clarify, the actual science they did is interesting (to me at least, as someone not in the field). The paper is linked here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 What is bullshit is the completely unwarranted conclusions in the title or in the quotes in the article. This is classic "science by press release". If you notice in the paper, they didn't do any testing, at all, with actual humans (or animals) and their blood sugar levels. The paper is mainly about the design of this "metasurface" which they claim allows higher resolution and sensitivity of a millimeter-wave radar system. The leap from what they've done to "no more needles for diabetics" is about 100x of "draw the rest of the owl". Again, to emphasize, I'm not denigrating the science they've done. I'm denigrating the hyping of it.
- sheepscreek 2y ago

mlhpdx 2y ago

No mention of the actual accuracy (and precision) which is critical, obviously. Or did I miss it?

ars 2y ago
Maybe one of these has it: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=BuqNOOwAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=BuqNOOwAAAAJ&hl=en Edit: It's here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 But he's clearly spent his entire career on this!

kumarvvr 2y ago

How can an algorithm be "artificial intelligence algorithm"? Does it mean AI models are used for data fitting? Or clustering? For data generated in such low scales, wouldnt statistical methods or procedural methods be sufficient or efficient or both?

gandalfgreybeer 2y ago
As an engineer working in the field who has designed both cloud algorithms and on-firmware algorithms, when marketing uses AI, it tends to just be training/data fitting. At best, the most complicated ones tend to be random forests and if any use neural networks, it’s usually just overkill. The answer to your last question is yes, especially when it’s from raw signals. Tbf, there are applications from devices that do use deep learning methods but from experience they are not practical except on very edge cases.
- jval43 2y ago
  >when marketing uses AI In my experience when marketing wants to use AI, they will. Regardless of whether it is ML, basic statistics or even just a few if-else blocks. It used to be the way you describe up to about 2-3 years ago, now the term is meaningless.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Hard_Space 2y ago
If you hard-code effective learned distributions from a trained model, I suppose that could be described as an 'AI algorithm', even though the final output is a flat algorithm.
bregma 2y ago
In modern common usage both the terms "AI" and "algorithm" are just newspeak for "a computer does something" so combining the two into a single phrase just superlatively multiplies the value, like how using a double negative emphasizes how very much more negative something is. In the middle ages the term might have been "miraculous" and it could also be well served just by sampling Magnus Pike exclaiming "SCIENCE!".

ars 2y ago

This title needs that missing exclamation mark. I read it straight as a single sentence and wondered when people used needles on their wrist.

jimrandomh 2y ago

This is yet another in a long line of glucose-measurement devices designed to sell to unsophisticated research grantmaking agencies, rather than to diabetics. Making a device that "measures" blood sugar in a watch form factor is easy, and many research groups have done so. Making one that's accurate enough to compete with the CGMs that are already on the market is a different matter entirely.

mmooss 2y ago
What about this research indicates to you that it doesn't address the accuracy issue?
- morganherlocker 2y ago
  > Shaker said. “No other technology can provide this level of precision without direct contact with the bloodstream.” The existing alternatives do have access to the bloodstream.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    How does that indicate that they didn't address the accuracy of their technology, as the GGP claims? > The existing alternatives do have access to the bloodstream. So? Who says otherwise? People don't want invasive tests that have direct contact with their bloodstream.
    - morganherlocker 2y ago
      If you're type 1 diabetic, accuracy is paramount, especially in a closed loop insulin pump setup. Even with access to the bloodstream, existing CGMs leave plenty of room for improvement that would directly improve quality of life a lot more than the annoyance of applying the sensor under the skin.
      - mmooss 2y ago
        > accuracy is paramount Who says that's not addressed by this technology? > directly improve quality of life a lot more than the annoyance of applying the sensor under the skin How annoying is it? They don't cut a hole and insert it. How can you say how much it would improve the quality of life? I don't see where all these assumptions about this technology come from.

whatnotests2 2y ago

Remarkable work! I was part of a team in 2014-2016 that tried using silicon micro needles layered with polymers in order to filter the interstitial fluid's glucose. Unfortunately it was difficult to calibrate for all the variables. We could have two sensors from the same silicon wager on the same person at the same time and get two different readings. Hats off to these researchers, who went a different direction. Better health really can start with glucose monitoring for everyone. Because we could all learn about sugar's effect on our bodies.

potamic 2y ago

They seem to be using radio waves instead of optical? Do radio waves penetrate the body or do they hypothesize that there will be changes on the surface of the skin due to blood sugar/pressure?

pythonguython 2y ago
Yes, it is sub optical RF sensing. The important factor here is that the gluclose blood capacitively couples to small sensing antennas. The sensing antennas are resonant elements, whose exact resonance changes depending on the surrounding environment, in this case gluclose in the blood. You can then transmit an RF signal to the antenna, then record the signal reflected from the antenna’s port to estimate the gluclose level.
toast0 2y ago
> Do radio waves penetrate the body Generally, yes. Attenuation varies by frequency, and I guess blood sugar and pressure, though.

azinman2 2y ago

> “We have a minimum viable product that’s already being used in clinical trials, and while there’s more work to be done, we’re much closer to a full marketable device,” Shaker said. I see this a lot. People seem to ignore the “viable” part of MVP. If there’s more work to be done to make it a full marketable device, it isn’t viable in its current stage. I wish them luck.

vlovich123 2y ago

> and microcontrollers, which process the radar signals using artificial intelligence algorithms So glad we've rebranded primitive ML and basic control mechanisms as AI.

winter_blue 2y ago
Or maybe just a signal processor is being rebranded as AI. Soon a Fast Fourier Transform will be rebranded as AI as well.
cdmckay 2y ago
Wasn’t ML always considered AI?
- consp 2y ago
  I've never seen ML been called AI until the past few years. And this is most likely not even ML but just fancy signal processing.
raincole 2y ago
Except AI has always meant quite primitive things. AI predates C. Actually AI predates lisp: > IPL was used to implement several early artificial intelligence programs, also by the same authors: the Logic Theorist (1956), the General Problem Solver (1957), and their computer chess program NSS (1958). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Langu...
bregma 2y ago
I had the same complaint over 20 years ago when the phrase "game AI" came into widespread use to describe a computer opponent. Now that we have an entire generation raised on the concept that anything a computer does is "AI" is it surprising everything a computer does is termed "AI"?

caseyy 2y ago

This all sounds exciting, and good luck to all researchers earnestly working on it. If RF blood content diagnostics become possible, blood glucose sensing would be just the start. But as for this guy and his invention, don’t forget that in clinical setting, Theranos has shown more evidence of their product working. And GlucoWatch, a similar idea two decades ago, was FDA-approved and made it to market though still wasn’t clinically useful due to poor accuracy. Then, I’m not even talking about the charlatan cottage industry around glucose sensing watches, nor am I talking about how CGMs are a (generally) solved problem in diabetes. Let’s wait for some clinical trials of the applied blood glucose sensing before we pop the champagne? It quite likely won’t happen, welcome as that invention would be.

consp 2y ago
> CGMs are a (generally) solved problem in diabetes. Good to know I'm not generally then.
pythonguython 2y ago
According to the paper, this worked because the dielectric change from all other blood diagnostics was negligible, allowing glucose to be measured. Gluclose in blood is around 80 mg/dL. It may be possible to measure other blood chemistry metrics that are similar in concentration at other frequencies, but there’s a lot of blood tests, many of which would probably be impossible - like white blood cell count, anything enzymatic, something whose concentration is measured in ug/dL, or something that has no effect on dielectric properties of the blood. I wouldn’t expect to see a whole blood panel via wearable radar anytime soon, but we may get a few more tests from RF sensing.

felipevb 2y ago

I'm super curious about how far Dexcom and Abbott's research departments are with developing these technologies. It could be a (partial) disruption for them. Also - flashback to Rockley Photonics ($RKLY) - and their years-long promise of non-invasive glucose monitoring.

throwaway_ab 2y ago

I wonder what other health measurements could be obtained with this technology? Sending radar through the wrist seems like a method that could observe much more information, although I am not sure which.

elric 2y ago
Perhaps common ailments such as iron insuffiency (anaemia), excess bilirubin, heck maybe even cholesterol?

exceptione 2y ago

What I miss in the paper is any accuracy figure for glucose sensing. If this is an alternative to needles, how would the measurements compare? That is the first question one should ask. I fear we can assume that, although the approach might be novel, it can't replace needles for accurate measurement. But maybe I am overlooking the performance comparison.

DavideNL 2y ago
Yea, it might perhaps be described more detailed in the mentioned paper (i haven't checked it yet.): https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4 EDIT: No, i don't think it's mentioned...
bobmcnamara 2y ago
They claim 90-some percent
croes 2y ago
Seems like it's nowhere near usable for glucose sensing https://chaos.social/@jaseg/113777015012964743 https://chaos.social/@jaseg/113777015012964743

SteveVeilStream 2y ago

This sounds great for the problem they are trying to solve but it also sounds like it could be useful for a lot of other interesting applications. I would assume you could put the same sensor on a plastic pipe and infer details about the liquid inside. If I was this team, I might look at how to commercialize this tech for industrial process control in parallel with the slow process of commercializing it for medical purposes. "The system’s key components are a radar chip, which sends and receives signals through the body, an engineered “meta-surface”, which helps focus these signals for better accuracy, and microcontrollers, which process the radar signals using artificial intelligence algorithms. The algorithms improve the accuracy and reliability of the readings by learning from the data over time."

spyder 2y ago

Looks like it's using mm-wave radar technology to detect changes of the dielectric properties of solutions with different levels of glucose. There is also a paper from them doing it with the Google's Project Sali dev kit, the radar that was mostly demonstrated with gesture recognition, but looks like it's useful for other things too like this. They also show it can be also used to detect glucose levels in drinks too like Coke vs diet Coke. Besides the current one posted, they have multiple other publications about the topic: Using Project Sali back in 2018: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=BuqNOOwAAAAJ&citation_for_view=BuqNOOwAAAAJ:GnPB-g6toBAC https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl... This one is also nice detailed one: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/3/385 https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/3/385 and looks like the current one is about improving this technology with enhanced signal-to-noise ratio.

richarme 2y ago
Nit: Google's project was called Soli.
tsimionescu 2y ago
> Looks like it's using mm-wave radar technology to detect changes of the dielectric properties of solutions with different levels of glucose. I wonder if this is actually a viable path to detecting blood glucose. Wouldn't it be sensitive to other substances that affect the dielectric properties of a solution as complex as blood?

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

We need to find the api endpoints of the body somehow.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

vinni2 2y ago

Wonder what happened to so called smart insulin https://bristol.ac.uk/news/2018/august/ziylo-deal.html https://bristol.ac.uk/news/2018/august/ziylo-deal.html

pneumatic1 2y ago
https://www.biocentury.com/article/653947/science-spotlight-novo-s-glucose-sensing-insulin-two-bacterial-immunotherapies-and-more https://www.biocentury.com/article/653947/science-spotlight-... NNC2215 explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVTS_J7Xmxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVTS_J7Xmxs
- vinni2 2y ago
  I saw this video but the acquisition happened 6 years ago but not much progress after that.

pakitan 2y ago

There is a company that (allegedly) already produces such a device: https://www.knowlabs.co/ https://www.knowlabs.co/ I've looked over the studies/tests they've done and they look decent, though the accuracy is not that great.

wsabihi 2y ago
I initially got excited about this (and know people who would really love this to exist), but after a bit of digging, I am convinced that this is likely a scam. This report explains why it is: https://whitediamondresearch.com/research/know-labs-is-an-obvious-medical-device-scam-we-call-it-theranos-retarded-cousin/ https://whitediamondresearch.com/research/know-labs-is-an-ob.... You could also look at the stock economics to see that this company has not behaved like one with a bright future.
- pakitan 2y ago
  Yeah, the stock price made me suspicious but I figured that it might be due to the not-so-great accuracy plus a lack of moat - even if it worked, you'd see a cheap copy on AliExpress in 2 weeks. I didn't see the report before though, so yeah, I'd agree it smells like scam. Especially when you see the CEO dabbles in NFTs

looopTools 2y ago

If it has sufficient accuracy then this could be cool. But I want to see it battle tested before raising my arms to high

tpoacher 2y ago

A prof of mine back in Oxford told us a story how he invented a similar noninvasive blood glucose monitoring technique, shown to work, patented it, patent bought by big pharma and silenced. I'm more than convinced we had this tech ages ago but it was not profitable to deploy it. Now either relevant patents are finally expiring or the market has changed enough to allow such players to enter.

crazygringo 2y ago
Do you have a link to his patent? You should be able to find it by his name. But the hurdle today isn't in the physical sensing technology, it's how to detect an accurate signal from extremely noisy data. Patents aren't the main blocker -- nobody has built this at all in a way that is accurate enough. And Apple has been trying hard, and they have nothing to do with Big Pharma.
lolc 2y ago
I'm sceptical of this story. This is a huge market and it was a huge market 20 years ago. I participated in studies with prototype devices to measure blood glucose and nobody I talked to mentioned patent blocks.

justinl33 2y ago

The comparison to weather satellites is misleading and oversells this technology. Weather radar works by detecting water droplets at known atmospheric heights - it's a fundamentally different problem than trying to measure glucose concentrations in blood through layers of tissue. The real breakthrough here isn't the radar tech (which has existed for years), it's the machine learning pipeline that can extract meaningful glucose data from extremely noisy radar returns.

DoctorOetker 2y ago
I don't believe the claim is radio echolocation, but radio spectroscopy. I didn't read the paper yet, but I predict from the comments in this HN thread, that the proposed system is essentially a dielectric spectroscopy setup optimized for glucose detection (or any number of proxy byproducts/complexes/etc..) Check this wikipedia page for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_spectroscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_spectroscopy Look at the picture on the right, from typically lower to higher frequencies there is the motion response of ions, the reorientation response of molecules with a dipole moment, the excitation of vibrational modes in a molecule and the electronic excitation of electrons switching orbitals... EDIT: since I have not read the article, I do not vouch for its authenticity (above my paygrade)

WesolyKubeczek 2y ago

Wake me when I, a consumer, can place an order for one. I keep hearing about such devices year in and year out, with none for sale. I feel like I will just die of old age or as a World War 3 casualty way before I can actually buy one.

barbegal 2y ago

There's far too many variables in skin for any non invasive techniques to work reliably in measuring blood glucose levels. The patches work fine and are highly accurate. The real next innovation is implanting devices inside the skin but the miniaturisation of the energy source to do this isn't quite there yet.

algorithmsRcool 2y ago

I'm happy at the prospect of more accurate readings. But honestly, the Libre 3 is already simply excellent and I would personally prefer the back of the arm location to more wrist based tech. I wear a traditional (Citizen) mechanical watch, because I hated needing to charge a smartwatch. I had some issues with the Libre 2 sensor getting knocked off or loosening after a few days in the shower. But the libre 3 is smaller than a US quarter coin and lasts 15 days and doesn't snag on anything. Will this watch exceed that? Because if not, then I'm not looking to switch. Lastly for diabetics or pre-diabetics that are only using finger sticks, I CANNOT stress enough how important a CGM is to your health. You learn so much about how your body actually works with certian foods rather than low frequency (but somewhat more accurate) finger sticks and that information dropped my A1C like a rock in just a few months. Tell your older relatives also. These are life saving devices.

trimethylpurine 2y ago

This article is from 2014 and it should be noted as such. Looking at the comments, it's clear people have been misled by the presentation of this article to think this is an emerging technology rather than an old and inappropriate application of one. For others reading; this is about a small radar technology, having nothing to do with research in the detection of blood glucose whatsoever.

freedomben 2y ago
> This article is from 2014 How do you know? The date on the article says October 29, 2024
- trimethylpurine 2y ago
  Well, I can agree that now the date on the article is 10/29/2024. When I posted this comment, it was dated 2014. I do see that internet archive has copies of the site that have the 2024 date but not from yesterday. Maybe a dead cmos battery or other time sync error changed the date temporarily yesterday. I don't have any other explanation, but I do respectfully withdraw my former opinion about the article.
  - croes 2y ago
    A simple typo?
    - trimethylpurine 2y ago
      I assumed that web servers handle date variables in this age. But you're absolutely right, we can't assume that.

bkraz 2y ago

For anyone interested in noninvasive glucose sensing, I'd highly recommend https://www.nivglucose.com/The%20Pursuit%20of%20Noninvasive%20Glucose%209th%20Edition.pdf https://www.nivglucose.com/The%20Pursuit%20of%20Noninvasive%... RF-based approaches have the problem that they are not specific to glucose. A molecule of glucose absorbs infrared light at specific wavelengths due to its size and types of bonds. It does not have specific absorption of radio frequencies. In this paper, researchers measured glucose in pure water at concentrations 100X physiological levels. I'd like to see this work with whole blood or a tissue phantom, or measure glucose independently from any other solute.

Beijinger 2y ago

Sorry to break the party. A buddy of mine is deeply skeptical, and he is one of the few with a decent amount of peer-reviewed publications about non-invasive blood glucose measurement. The idea to use "Radar near-field sensing" is everything but new and nothing has ever come out of it. "Breakthroughs" in this field are a dime a dozen: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/liom-cracks-holy-grail-non-221500540.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/liom-cracks-holy-grail-non-22... My buddy is one of the few guys that has a sound (no pun intended) technology that might work. But future will tell. I won't give a link. Yes, the company secured funding.

zamadatix 2y ago
This is "my uncle who works at Nintendo said Sony sucks" level information to anyone but you. I do agree on one part regardless of any of that though... I'm at the point of waiting for the one who actually sells me said device instead of the one that says they'll soon be able to.
- Beijinger 2y ago
  At this state, they are likely able to do this. Not small enough for your watch but a working stationary device that can RELIABLY monitor your blood sugar. And with blood sugar I don't mean the skin prick test. If people claim they compared to the skin prick test and "it works" they have no idea what they are talking about. You have to compare venereal blood glucose with measured blood glucose and use the Clarke error grid to show what you are doing. And yes, skin color or skin temperature (fever!) does not matter for his measurement. I once submitted an SBIR grant for this project, but have no involvement anymore with this project. The NIH found this approach "highly innovative" but thought it can not be realized bc the technology is "prohibitive expensive". I assume they did not really read the proposal. I explicitly wrote that, while such a device costs 50k on the market, a slimmed down version produced in quantities would cost a few hundred dollars. They just had a short look at the approach, googled the hardware behind it, and rejected it. An idiot and google is a very dangerous combination!
  - zamadatix 2y ago

sowbug 2y ago

Slightly OT, but just last night I finished a 15-day Dexcom Stelo CGM session. If you can afford the $99, I highly recommend it. There is a world of difference between an intellectual understanding of blood glucose and actually witnessing your body maintaining exquisite control over a system dependent on food, exercise, stress, time of day, and the idiosyncrasies of your individual insulin response.

ra7 2y ago
I’ve been looking to try an CGM to see how all those factors affect my blood sugar. Is Dexcom Stelo the best available OTC? How do you like the analytics in the app?
- sowbug 2y ago
  I didn't look at the competition. I knew the Dexcom brand because my friends have had good experiences with the G series, so the Stelo was an easy impulse purchase. I'm neither diabetic nor prediabetic, so I'm not a good representative of those audiences. For someone glucose-curious like me, the Stelo is just right. The app provides a slightly laggy real-time graph of measurements (collected every 5 minutes and reported every 15 minutes). It uses some heuristics to identify rising/falling events, and it'll notify you for the steeper cases (but I'm not sure about hypoglycemic event notifications, as I had a couple of those while sleeping and found out only when I woke up). On Android, it uses the Health Connect hub to sync some health data with other apps. It provides a rudimentary event-log function to add meal, exercise, and FYI notations. You'll also get a daily time-in-range wrap-up. The more interesting analytics are in clarity.dexcom.com, which is a website that visualizes data that the app is constantly pushing, with a couple-hour lag. There you will find more graphs, tables that group measurements by day and hour, and various expected calculations (average, standard deviation, CV, calculated GMI). And you'll also find the all-important export to CSV button, which gives you all the sensor data. Using that I was able to import everything to Google Sheets, where I did a linear regression with finger-prick measurements to ascertain the sensor's (mild) deviation. The Stelo feature set is clearly designed to provide all the data eventually, but not quickly enough to be useful for diabetics who need real-time info for glucose management. That's how they'll continue segmenting the Stelo and G7 audiences. I have no problem with that; if OTC GCM cost continues to drop, and they become as prevalent as annual lipid/metabolic labs, I could see the incidence of lifestyle-attributable T2D dropping, which would obviously have massive benefits to society.

tlubinski 2y ago

We - at DiaMonTech - are working on non-invasive glucose monitoring for over a decade now. It's a hard and complex problem and as long as clinical data is missing, I'm very sceptical. We just reached (in a clinical trial) a comparable accuracy as early-stage invasive devices that got FDA approved with a shoe-box-sized device and we still have some work to do. The pre-print of our publication is here: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5289491/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5289491/v1 I'm excited to see new developments but in this case, I'm not sure this will reach the market anytime soon.

WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
I was actually thinking about your product when venting my frustrations elsewhere in the thread. Your site was mentioning elsewhere that you had a working shoebox-sized device which, "due to its size", was "only targeted at hospitals". Man, you have no idea. I'd gladly buy a shoebox-sized thing. No finger pricking and no test strips to buy is the king. It could be 4U rackmount thing for all I care, as long as it was noninvasive and accurate.
- tlubinski 2y ago
  It's not approved yet anyway. But if you are ever in Berlin, let me know and I'll give you a tour.
bob_theslob646 2y ago
Why do you think that this will not reach the market anytime soon?
- tlubinski 2y ago
  Because the engineers of the University of Waterloo haven't shown any clinical data yet.

nis0s 2y ago

If I generally know what my levels are on a daily basis as both my diet and my routine is constant, then I don’t need a device. But I guess some people do. It’s also a little presumptuous to believe that someone would want to wear a bulky medical device for an easily manageable and non-life threatening condition all the time. If not wearing a medical device doesn’t kill you, then why do you need to wear it? Form factor and comfort is important.

typon 2y ago

This is one technology that I've been waiting for for over a decade. Apple apparently hasn't given up on it, despite working on it for 10+ years as well. I am hopeful it can be solved because diabetes is one of the biggest killers on Earth today.

Projectiboga 2y ago

Wow just read the press release, they claim it is under clinical trials while they keep refining the engineering. They are using radar and claim it is actually an improvement over current tech. My interest is peaked with my being a type 1 diabetic w 42 years on RNA derived insulin and 42 years since starting fingerstick blood glucose tests since Febuary 1983. I've been on CGM for around 5 or 6 years now.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

croes 2y ago

>The press release: "[our stuff] senses glucose levels for diabetics more accurately than ever before" >The actual research: basically a better antenna that can distinguish between distilled water and a ~25000 mg/dL glucose solution absent any other factors. For context: At around 500 mg/dL you're dead. https://chaos.social/@jaseg/113777015012964743 https://chaos.social/@jaseg/113777015012964743

throwaway-blaze 2y ago

Not T1 or T2 but wore CGM patches for a month. Amazing insight into how your body reacts to foods and food + exercise. Even if this tech isn't accurate enough at first for people who need to manage a disease, it could be amazing for anyone interested in health optimization.