Measuring Blood Glucose Using Vertical Cavity Semiconductor Lasers (VCSELs)

Abstract

As diabetes mellitus is becoming a more widespread serious disease, a more convenient and ac- curate way of controlling blood glucose, which improves the patient’s life quality and adds savings for health care systems, is desirable. Optical methods are one of the painless and promising methods that can be used for blood glucose predictions. However, having accuracies lower than what is acceptable clinically has been a major concern. To improve on the accuracy of the predictions, the signal-to- noise ratio in the spectrum can be increased, for which the use of thermally tunable vertical cavity semiconductor lasers (VCSEL) is proposed. This paper will present and discuss the results of applying Partial Least Square (PLS) techniques on small wavelength windows with the goal of determining the number of VCSELs required to predict glucose concentration, and verify that with PLS it is possible to predict glucose concentration from a selected subset of absorption spectra.