Missing out on those few extra candy bars isn’t what many diabetics dread most. It’s the daily, pesky draw from the finger to test their blood that causes the most frustration.
But Dr. Walter Hu’s collaborative research with TI and the UNT Health Science Center soon will make that painful chore a thing of the past.
Funding from the Texas Medical Research Collaborative – of which TI is a founding member – has helped Hu develop a biochip that can detect biomarkers for diabetes from a saliva sample. Eventually, those results can then be sent to doctors’ offices via a reader device that patients can plug into their smart phone.
About 10 chips from TI – including an MSP430 microcontroller and ADC preamplifiers – power the test strip and reader device.
“These findings could have a great impact on medicine as we know it,” said Hu, an associate professor of electrical engineering at UT Dallas. “It really will allow a diabetes patient to monitor his disease at home. The chip is so low cost that it could be very comparable to the cost of a gluco strip. And the functionality would allow us to look at other factors on the same test strip.”