2023 · Journal of medical engineering & technology · paywalled
Comparative assessment of blood glucose monitoring techniques: a review
Ahmadian et al.
The finding, in our words
Non-invasive and minimally invasive blood glucose monitoring techniques enable continuous tracking without pain, although traditional invasive methods retain superior accuracy relative to reference blood glucose measurements. Emerging wearable biosensors and alternative matrices such as interstitial fluid, saliva, and sweat offer promising solutions to enhance patient compliance and quality of life.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Salivary cortisol is suitable as an adjunctive measure in decentralised monitoring, with lateral-flow assays providing rapid low-cost discrete measurements and wearable platforms enabling higher-frequency collection but facing biofouling and calibration challenges. Suitability requires validation in authentic saliva against reference methods, not merely low detection limits.
Continuous glucose monitoring in interstitial fluid provides diabetes patients with a tool for insulin dosing and diet planning that avoids the pain and inconvenience of fingerstick testing. Wearable sensors can also track lactate, sodium, potassium and hydrogen ions in sweat, and as methods to correlate these with blood concentrations improve, the technology will become valuable for monitoring people under extreme physiological stress.
Gao et al., Journal of applied physiology (paywalled) · source ↗
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
Wearable biochemical monitoring requires a complete measurement chain that integrates quality-controlled biofluid sampling, sensor fusion and metadata capture to convert raw sensor outputs into clinically valid digital biomarkers.
Over-the-counter continuous glucose monitors demonstrated reasonable agreement with overall capillary blood glucose trends in individuals without diabetes, yielding an overall mean absolute relative difference of 12.9%. However, sensor accuracy decreased following carbohydrate consumption, suggesting caution is required when using these devices for diagnostic cut-offs or exact-value monitoring.
Prakash et al., Journal of diabetes science and technology (paywalled) · source ↗