A Novel Needle-Injectable Millimeter scale Wireless Electrochemical Glucose Sensing Platform for Artificial Pancreas Applications

Modern healthcare systems are under constant pressure to deliver personalized, effective care to billions of patients suffering from chronic non-communicable disease like diabetes. A closed-loop disease management system is an ideal solution for such patients. An example of this is an artificial pancreas for diabetes management. For safe and effective closed-loop disease management, the cost, size, longevity, warm-up time, and response speed need to match the performance of a healthy biological system (e.g. the pancreas). In this paper, a novel needle-injectable mm-size wireless sensing platform is presented to fulfill these requirements for an artificial pancreas by combining advanced microelectronics, nanotechnology and advanced biomaterial science. The proposed platform utilizes a sensor that is smaller than a sesame seed and provides fundamental advantages in terms of fast response speed, high accuracy, short warm-up time, and low cost of goods. Owing to these features, the system will enable true closed-loop glucose control (without any meal announcements and carbohydrate calculations), especially among infants and toddlers. The system has the potential to significantly improve diabetes management and in general chronic disease management for billions of patients.