PI: Prof. Jayanta Mukherjee, Electrical Engineering

Tata Fellow: Pratik Sawant (2018-20)

Diabetes has often been described as a `slow moving’ epidemic. Diabetes is a major problem not just because of the costs involved in treating diabetes but also the complications and costs involved for advanced cases. It is estimated that a great percentage of diabetics die due to cardiovascular causes which have their own high costs. Kidney failure is another major cause of diabetic deaths. Diabetes also degrades the quality of life of the patients due to various complications like muscular pain, non-healing wounds, neuropathies, blindness and many other complications. Accurate monitoring of diabetes and timely treatment can delay many of the symptoms and prolong life of diabetics. Also those patients who are at the pre-diabetes stage can postpone the onset of full-blown diabetes by proper treatment of the pre-diabetes, if it can be detected early. One reason why continuous monitoring is not possible is the invasive nature of the current available methods.

It is proposed to develop a system which is non-invasive, does not need materials to be replenished and can monitor blood glucose continuously. We aim to achieve this by monitoring the dielectric constant of the blood continuously by measuring the reflection and transmission of electromagnetic waves (EM waves) through the human arm. Change in blood glucose levels cause change in the dielectric constant of blood. Our proposed method of blood glucose monitoring will involve measuring change in the blood dielectric constant due to changes in glucose concentration.