Market

The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) has estimated the global diabetic population in 2010 to be 285 million. This figure is expected to grow and reach a staggering figure of 438 million by 2030. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) has shown that the direct and indirect costs of diabetes on the US healthcare system totaled $132 billion in 2002, of which $91.8 billion was caused by direct medical expenses.

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.

This has led to the development of Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) which allows frequent testing and enables the patients with diabetes to achieve tight glycemic control thereby improving the quality of life. 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 5 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 by warning the patient in advance of the risk of a forthcoming hypoglycemic event (blood glucose level too low).