Needleless Blood Sugar Monitoring Watch
This watch could be a great gift for a diabetic child or even an adult who is painfully tired of finger sticks to monitor blood sugar. It has been around for adults for a few years and was recently approved by the FDA for use on children as well. Alas, it has to be calibrated every day with finger stick testing, so it only gets rid of a few of them, and it must be warmed up to work, and it is better at monitoring blood sugar that is too high, than too low. It is available now from most any pharmacy. It does not require a prescription, but some places demand one anyway. It tends not to work well if one is sweating.
It can take readings as often as every 10 minutes for up to 13 hours at a time. An alarm can sound if one's blood sugar is too high or low, or getting there. It also stores the readings, up to 8,500 of them.
It could be very useful to warn a user if his or her blood sugar were dropping dangerously. Brittle diabetics especially would benefit from its continuous monitoring. It could even save their lives if it warns them of an unrealized period of bad hypoglycemia.
The information it collects can be uploaded into a computer for a printed readout of the diabetic's sugar history.
It isn't all good news. The watch has to be used very carefully, thus making it not a good choice for a careless or very young child, or a confused adult. It can cause skin irritation. It isn't waterproof. It has to be worn tightly. And worst of all it is expensive. The sensors have to be changed every 12 hours and cost about $360 every three months according to the source I read, but prices vary greatly and come down in time.
Many insurance companies might not want to cover it, but you can get a "letter of medical necessity" from your doctor and send that in with your insurance claim.
Stuff Only Mr. Spock Understands. How it works.
It works through a process known as iontophoresis. A small unfeelable current is passed through the skin to the watch's collection disks which serve as an anode and cathode during glucose extraction. The ions that are the electric current bring a tiny bit of blood sugar with them through the skin and they deposit it on the cathode. Enzymes in the cathode disk chemically break the blood sugar down and cause an electrochemical signal that the biosensors can read over a ten minute period of time. Then it reverses the process, turning the anode into a cathode and the cathode into an anode, and it does the whole process again. Ok, you can beam me down again, Scotty! The nice thing about iontophoresis is that it can go in both directions. It can put things into the skin as well as take things out of the skin. So a watch that not only reads blood sugar but delivers it into the patient is being developed. More about that at the back of this report.