Tiny patch would give diabetics painless glucose monitoring

University of Waterloo  researchers are developing a new patch that would offer diabetics an affordable, accurate, pain-free, round-the-clock alternative to traditional tests that require pricking a finger for a blood sample every few hours. University of Waterloo  researchers are developing a new patch that would offer diabetics an affordable, accurate, pain-free, round-the-clock alternative to traditional tests that require pricking a finger for a blood sample every few hours. And to make it even more user-friendly, potentially life-saving readings from the patch would be transmitted to people's smartphones. After three years of work, the research team is perfecting a wearable patch that uses hundreds of tiny microneedles to sense glucose levels, crucial information for diabetics who need to know exactly how much medication they require at any one time. "This will improve people's lifestyle by leading to more personalized medicine-taking," said Peyman GhavamiNejad, an engineering PhD candidate at Waterloo who led the work. "We want to make it easier for people to monitor themselves, without any pain, with better control of the levels of their glucose and so they know how much insulin to take." Although a variety of monitoring patches have been commercially available for several years, GhavamiNejad said this is the first of its kind. "It's really novel work that we continue to improve," he said of the electro-chemical sensor.