Painless diabetes test

A daily regimen of pricked fingers and blood tests is an essential part of life for someone living with diabetes.

But perhaps not for much longer, thanks to efforts by Dr Mak Paranjape and Dr John Currie, researchers at Georgetown Advanced Electronics Laboratory (GAEL) at Georgetown University, Washington DC who are aiming to make such painful procedures a thing of the past.

For the past few years, the Georgetown team has been developing and testing a new biosensor device for blood glucose monitoring. The size of a small bandaid plaster, it is designed to be worn anywhere on the body, where it samples tiny amounts of fluids that lie just beneath the skin.

The device is small and convenient, and makes measuring glucose levels pain-free and non-invasive.

Traditional blood monitoring techniques use a needle to make a relatively large, deep hole to extract blood droplets from the capillaries, which lie deeper under the surface of the skin.