Today is Sweet
By: Sarah Seto and Katia Deyneko
Intermediate Category (Grades 9-10)
Innovation | Biology, Chemistry
BCVSF Note:
The required ethics forms have been submitted for this project.
Many companies have made millions of dollars off of diabetics. Every day, thousands of test strips are purchased for a single-use test: and then disposed of, heading for the landfill. Our product is aimed to help diabetics save money, carry less, and most importantly, not feel pain. The main difference about our device from the commercial product is that our device is non-invasive and non-penetrative. Diabetics no longer have to feel pain or wear bandages to cover their fingers.
With our product, we’ve solved 3 things. Environment, money, and comfort. No longer will one time use test strips and lancets need to be disposed of. No longer will diabetics have to spend thousands on buying new test strips and lancets. And no longer will they feel the penetrative pain produced by the lancets, especially small children.
We approached the problem from a diabetic’s point of view. What would they want? Settling on the safest and most hygienic way, we used the resistance of skin ions to measure glucose in the bloodstream. Our independent variable was the amount of glucose in each experiment, and our dependent variable was the results we got from our multimeter and ohmmeter, which we used for testing resistance. The control was a commercial product, one that used lancets and test strips.
For our results, we found that the more glucose that was in the bloodstream (or in the water, as that was our substitute), the lower the resistance was. We think that this is because the glucose in the water brings up it’s conductivity rate, so the higher the amount of glucose, the lower the resistance will be.
Our invention contributes to the area and health and biochemistry. We met our objective of finding and making a way to test blood glucose for diabetics without penetrating skin.
