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Friday, July 16, 2021
Until now, continuous blood glucose monitoring has been carried out exclusively via invasive medical devices (needles or implants), for which the sensors have to be changed regularly, entailing significant infectious risks.
Researchers at Institut Fresnel, in collaboration with C2VN and CINaM, are studying a new non-invasive technological approach to glucose monitoring, using radio frequencies. They have developed a truly non-invasive microwave tomography prototype capable of efficiently detecting glucose concentrations in patients suffering from hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia. The system consists of antenna-based sensors, which receive and transmit signals to and from the patient's arm. Initial developments were the subject of a patent application in October 2020, followed by a paper published in 2021[1]. The strong interest in this non-invasive monitoring method has also been identified by the Defense Innovation Agency, which is co-funding a thesis with Aix-Marseille University to further develop the system. In particular, the interest of the electromagnetic probe on ex vivo liver tissue and successively on tissue from healthy and obese mice is currently being tested at C2VN.
These significant advances offer hope in the field of non-invasive glucose sensors. Initiated by initial funding obtained under the Institut Carnot STAR's 2020 call for scientific resourcing projects, which enabled the measurement concept to be validated, this project is now taking on a broader dimension, with prospects for commercialization well underway. It also demonstrates the value of Carnot actions in bringing together researchers from different fields (in this case, electromagnetism and cardiovascular health) to set up highly interdisciplinary projects of societal interest.