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Diabetes is one of the world’s biggest global health threats. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently estimated that there are over 170 million people affected by diabetes worldwide (based on a report by the American Diabetes Association, published in Diabetes Care, Vol. 27, Nr.27, 2004).
Today, the established method to monitor the blood glucose profile is to draw a small amount of blood from the fingertips and determine the glucose level via a portable glucose monitoring instrument. This is typically done 2 to 5 times a day, in some cases even more than 10 times. There is a growing medical interest not only by patients but also by health care professionals to be able to monitor more closely trends and patterns in glucose levels to provide greater reduction in the risk of long-term diabetic complications and serious hypoglycemic incidents.
There are minimally invasive monitoring devices already on the market, but the drawbacks of these devices are the irritation of skin and/or tissue by the sampling method as well as the limited time of use (typically 3 days lifetime per sensor). Several methods have been proposed and evaluated for a truly non-invasive method of continuous glucose monitoring, but none so far has proven itself reliable enough in everyday life.
With a non-invasive monitoring device it is possible to improve the compliance of diabetes patients and better control their blood glucose level, which helps the patients to reduce the number of hypoglycemic events, preferably even warn the patient in advance of the risk of a forthcoming hypoglycemic event (blood glucose level too low).
A better control of blood glucose levels leading to a reduction in the long-term complications of diabetes could save over the next ten years in the US alone between $35 and $75 billion (based on a report by the Center Ourcomes Research, published in Clinica Therapeutics, Volume 27, Number 6, 2005).
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