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A comment on Apple Makes Major Progress on No-Prick Blood Glucose Tracking for Its Watch. Parent comment

Re:Apple Makes Major Progress on No-Prick Blood Glucose Trac... by crazygringo on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @07:53PM (#34905356)
Replying to my own comment: I found a 2021 paper that goes over all the different technologies being considered, and the wide variety is frankly staggering. Table 10 lists ten different principles under consideration (fluorescence, spectroscopy, etc.) with their various pros/cons. Not ELI5, but as close as you might get:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2516-1091/abe6f8#...

Seems like spectroscopy seems particularly promising, and according to the article, that's the approach Apple is taking. (Makes sense for a watch.)

And from the paper, the challenges with spectroscopy are signal interference -- scattering, water absorption, and distinguishing between glucose and other sugar components. So it ultimately sounds like a fiendishly complex signal processing problem. Which is exactly the kind of problem that is very very hard yet maybe not impossible.

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Re:Apple Makes Major Progress on No-Prick Blood Glucose Trac... by reilly3000 on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @09:39PM (#34906020)
That is the type of problem that takes a company of Apple’s size to tackle.
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Re:Apple Makes Major Progress on No-Prick Blood Glucose Trac... by tlubinski on Thursday February 23, 2023 @03:38AM (#34908281)
The IMHO gold standard book to get an understanding of the history of non-invasive glucose monitoring and the different technological approaches is "The Pursuit of Noninvasive Glucose: Hunting the Deceitful Turkey" by John Smith: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Smith-241/publicat...

We - at DiaMonTech - working on a solution with mid-infrared spectroscopy and showed good accuracy in a published paper in the "Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology". We plan another clinical trial this year, but yes, this took some time. We started in 2015 and still have some work to do.

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