An optofluidic system with volume measurement and surface plasmon resonance sensor for continuous glucose monitoring

The traditional technology of glucose monitoring is painful and invasive because of the frequent blood collection. Nowadays, the enzyme electrode sensor is mainly used for continuous glucose monitoring in clinic, but it has inherent disadvantages of significant signal drift of current due to bioelectricity in body and the missing of hypoglycemia resulting from the irreversible consumption of glucose at the process of enzyme catalytic reaction. Interstitial fluid (ISF) transdermal extraction can be nearly unsensible which effectively reduces the pain caused by invasive detection so that it may provide a new way to monitor glucose. MEMS technology has been used to produce devices for transdermal ISF extraction, but there is a lack of on-chip ISF volume measurement capabilities, which are required to compensate skin permeability variations. This paper presents a lab-on-a-chip system for ISF transdermal extraction, ISF volume measurement, and optical glucose sensing towards the application of continuous glucose monitoring. The device significantly incorporates a MEMS volume sensor, which measures extracted ISF volume via conductance monitoring, and integrates a fiber-optic surface plasmon resonance sensor to measure glucose concentration in microchannel. The fiber-based technique provides an excellent approach to overcome the above two drawbacks of the enzyme electrode based glucose sensing. Six different volumes were tested, and the standard deviation of every sample is less than 0.05 μl, The resonance wavelength moves from 549.081 nm to 592.914 nm while the concentration ranges from 0 to 200 mg/dl. The feasibility of the single-chip device for accurate and continuous monitoring of subcutaneous ISF glucose concentrations is verified.