Simulation of a multi-strip blood glucometer

Normal blood glucose levels are tightly regulated in the human body, in the range of 70-150 mg/dL. With the increasing awareness that uncontrolled diabetes plays a significant role in the onset and progress of other diseases, severely diabetic patients are being advised to closely monitor their haemoglucose levels, as often as four times every day. This is done in a home environment, by means of a glucometer and enzyme-coated test strips, having high specificity for glucose. The test strips are expensive and specific to the glucometer of a particular manufacturer, which implies that a patient is tied to one glucometer, making it economically unviable, especially in a developing country like India. Efforts are being made to develop a portable glucometer, which would accommodate, if not all, most of the commercial glucose test strips, available in the market today. As a first step, three of the most widely used test strips have been characterised and a circuit has been designed to obtain their current responses. This paper describes the simulation of the circuit and discusses the results obtained.