Future directions for reader

Team Glucotank wants to continue working on this project so I'm going to talk about some of our ideas. Now that we have a working prototype, we're looking at the ways in which we could improve or extend it. We would really like to eventually have a device that lights up a panel of 10-15 LEDs, meaning that the ranges of glucose concentration indicated will be smaller. Right now we can basically only give a high/medium/low reading. This is useful for screening or very basic monitoring. This is important given that there is very little monitoring at all right now but still not the level of accuracy we want to achieve. Even though a panel of LEDs would still only give ranges of glucose concentration, this is really all that is needed for patients. We realized this when talking to someone looking at our display at the museum. Since recommended insulin dosages are based off of ranges of glucose concentration, patients can just be told how much insulin to take based on whichever range our device indicates. In this way, our device can be simpler but still as accurate from a practical standpoint as a typical glucometer that gives an actual numerical reading for glucose concentration.

We are also playing around with different ideas about how we could take our design and make it something that applies to different types of colorimetric diagnostic strips. Rather than having a circuit that works only with our set glucose concentration ranges, it would be more versatile. We want to look into using a simple processor to compare light intensity from a sample to light intensity from a gradient scale on the strip (similar to our first design). With something like this, different types of strips would all have their own control gradient scale and could be read by the same device. Programming something to perform these more complicated operations could definitely be tricky though.

At the museum we spoke with one of the Dlab ICT instructors about collaborating with students from his class on this project. He's very interested in sitting down and learning more about the details and capabilities of the chemistry involved with our glucose strips. We're thinking of combining our understanding of the biochemistry/health/community aspects of this project and his students' knowledge of how to actually build these more complex circuits and write more complicated programs (for this reader deivce and perhaps for cellphones eventually). At this point we have definitely learned that a big part of getting this type of project to succeed is knowing how to ask the right questions from the right people...so this seems like a great potential partnership! Also, some of the people who helped us out with these initial designs are very interested in continuing to help us out, so things are looking pretty good!