Tattoo To Monitor Diabetes

infonography notes that the "BBC is reporting about using tattoos to monitor the state of a diabetics' health. While TV's the Invisible Man series had this, this is actually real. Designed by Gerard Cote, of Texas A&M University they are made of polyethylene glycol beads that are coated with fluorescent molecules. Likely this will start to change the attitudes of parents who have been resisting the urging of their kids to get Tattoos."

Comments

Handy...

[Richy_T]

Now when a diabetic goes hypo, the words "feed me sugar" can appear across their forehead.

Or, remembering a particularly traumatic experience when a friend went hypo, perhaps the words "fuck you" to save them the bother of saying them themselves (yes, I know a hypo diabetic is not in their right mind).

Rich

Wha?

[Steve G Swine]

Likely this will start to change the attitudes of parents who have been resisting the urging of their kids to get Tattoos.

"Oh, c'mon, Mom, just get a tasteful little rose somewhere..."

How long would this last?

[ndnet]

This sounds like a great idea, and I know many people (my grandfather included) who would prefer this to the finger pricking fun on a regular basis. However, it does raise a couple of questions.

1) How long would it last? Since it ISN'T absorbed into the cells, how long could the fluorescent dye, if you will, stay in the "interstitial fluid"? Would you need a new tattoo every month? year?

2) How much will it cost? The method doesn't really sound that expensive, except for the watch-like device. But will HMOs pay for it? Medicare?

3) How reliable is it? There are some diabetics who are very sensitive to sugar differences. Howa accurate can this be? Does it compare favorably with strips?

Gimme!

[mindriot]

If this is actually working, I'd happily volunteer to be the first to use it... I think the advantage is not that it's pain-free. I couldn't care less about pricking me in the finger. The real problems with conventional systems are

• You are dependent on an electronic device and test strips. You have to carry it with you at all times (or should at least), and I could move around much more freely if I did not need to take with me and look after my glucose tester.
• The test strips have to be bought regularly (I use between three and five per day), and they're not exactly cheap. It's also a pain because, at least in Germany, I have to get a Doctor's prescription each and every time I need to buy new supplies. Some sort of subscription would really help here. I am diabetic, and I will be for probably the rest of my life, so why the need to get a stupid prescription all the time, instead of having some sort of token that entitles me to buy my medication whenever I need to?
• Nothing could be of more help than a continuous measurement. That way, for example, I could immediately tell if my food had more carbs than I expected and I can react sooner.

Also, while devices for continuous measurement are out there, I don't expect them to be really comfortable, and I'd still depend on a device that I have to look after. So if this tattoo proves to be working, I'd be more than happy to use it.

Oh, and a question -- this polymer stuff reminds me of those materials used in modern hard-to-forge banknotes (see here for instance), is that a similar material?

Re:Gimme!

[Yorrike]

The case here in New Zealand is you must get a prescription, but after that, the test strips are effectively free. I've been dreaming of a watch that'd constantly tell me my blood sugar since I was a boy.

Don't dispare, there's some interesting treatment in development here in New Zealand that's cured a few Type 1 diabetics (like me), by using pig isolete cells encased in polymer tubes that are implanted in the abdominal area.

Really great stuff, but New Zealand's government is full of crack pots who think that such implants could introduce a retro virus - so the recipiants of the implants have been in Mexico and the Cook Islands so far (they're actually curing people).

Sounds cool, sign me up

[jonabbey]

It sounds like there's a lot of details left to be worked out, but if something like this could serve as a continuous blood glucose diagnostic, I'm so there. Having been an insulin dependent diabetic for the last 13 years or so, a continuous blood glucose monitor has really been the most important missing piece to the whole puzzle.

Sampling my blood sugar once or twice a day is far too infrequent to get a sense of how my blood sugar rises and falls over time. Having a monitor that could record my blood sugar levels even every five minutes would be fantastic. Make it able to sample every five seconds and hook it up to an insulin pump, and you've got as close to a cybernetic cure as one could hope for.

Being an insulin-dependent diabetic is like driving a manual transmission car.. very workable, but you have to do a lot more work, and you have to know what the engine and gears are doing. If it's still too early for a cure, having a really good tachometer would be the next best thing.

And having an intelligent cyber-tattoo would be just too cyber-punky for words. Sign me up.

Re:Pain free?

[Yorrike]

I've been a type 1 (insulin dependant) diabetic for 19 years (since I was 3) and no matter what anyone tells you, it still hurts. You do get used to it, but it's pain I'd rather avoid, all the same.

a few more benefits

[exhilaration]

This is cool - I thought of a few more benefits:

1) This would make it far easier for the patient's loved ones to measure their glucose levels. A mother would be able to check a child's glucose level in the middle of the night without waking him/her up. I can also imagine a coworker saying, "Dude, your glucose looks a little low - maybe you should go eat something." :)

2) Even without a bracelet or necklace identifying the patient as a diabetic, emergency personel could quickly see the patient's gluocose levels. If a diabetic is laying on the side of the road about to enter a coma, saving a few seconds could be critical.

Personally, I like (1) - it would be a huge quality of life improvement.

Flourescent tattoos

[FCAdcock]

Flourescent tattoos are not safe

As a professional tattoo artist, and a liscensed one to boot, I am regularly asked if I can/will do the new flourescent tattoos, and I always give the exact same answer. "NO!"

In 20 years, I may, but right now, while there have never been any long term tests to see if these tattoos will cause bodily harm, I refuse to put flourescent ink in anyone. There have been no tests to aprove the flourescent inks for permanent cosmetic use, so no one is certain that these inks are safe. Every bottle of ink in my shop comes with about 20 pages of paperwork documenting that the inks have passed years of medical testing, and have been found safe. The flourescent inks do not come with this paperwork, so I refuse stock those inks.

Think about it, things that glow usualy come with warnings saying not to ingest, that means it's not safe. When you put ink in your skin, it does the same thing as if you swallow it.

Re:Flourescent tattoos

[Effugas]

I actually looked into this myself some time ago. (I was doing some research on some rather brainfucked abuses of inkjet printers.) Yes, you're absolutely right that raw fluorescent ink fails pretty spectacularly over time. Not only does sunlight (with its massive UV1/UV2 dosage) bleach the fluorescent tats down to a ugly yellow stain, but it apparently becomes quite...err...itchy over time.

Not pretty.

However, some massive new work is being done with encapsulating various forms of bio-active chemicals (the bleached ink molecules are enough to spawn an itch reaction) within various types of polymer chains. Some pretty interesting stuff is being done with encapuslating approaches...a really elegant breast cancer treatment works as follows: Take a potent anti-cancer agent (poison, to be blunt) and attach it to a non-toxic, heat-sensitive polymer, such that the combination of the two remains non-toxic.

Inject the combo into the bloodstream.

Take the patient, and dip her breasts in water hot enough to separate the polymer from the toxin. Now watch as two things happen:

1) Only the breasts reach critical temperature, so only they might be exposed to the chemo, and
2) The blood vessels in the breast will expand, and those sections with the most blood vessels will receive the highest dosage of the chemo. Those sections are usually tumors.

From what I can tell, it's pretty tricky to design the polymer that is stable at 98.6F and unstable at 105F -- any hotter, and you're doing damage with the heat alone! Creating arbitrarily stable non-toxics is comparitively much easier. That's what it sounds like they're doing here -- they're taking a molecule with a useful function (fluorescence), attaching it to something that prevents it from reaching toxicity, and linking the expression of fluorescence to the level of insulin surrounding the molecule.

It is likely a useful side effect of this will be generically functional fluorescent ink, replete with quite a bit more than the 20 pages of paperwork you're used to.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Obvious next step...

[tlambert]

The obvious next step is to vary the type of material being used linearly across the tattoo itself, turning it into a "glucose meter".

As an interesting aside, could this method be used to produce tattoos that were more easily removable as well?

I think I would want this to be removable, particularly when stem cell research finally cures diabetes once and for all, and you are left with a legacy tattoo.

-- Terry

s/glucose/opiates/

[DrVeg]

This really has great medical potential, but I can imagine similar developments of the future used for other purposes. Being able to monitor bodily chemicals could be extremely valuable, but also subject to unexpected uses.
As condition of your employment, you agree to a permanent tattoo that indicates drug use.
Or,
The court orders you to get a drug-monitoring tattoo and scan it by your home internet-connected device every 6 hours.

Re:Close but no cigar.

[Myco]

The really cool part is if these were cybernetic implants, and you could slap the replacement cartridges into your wrists just like Spidey's webshooters.

Cosmetic applications

[Myco]

Well, first of all I'd really hate to see people just getting a boring old meter on their arm. I mean, it doesn't really matter what shape the thing is in as long as you can read it, right? So get a funky spiral or make it part of a larger design or something.

What would be even cooler would be to start seeing this technology, and "adaptive tattoos" in general made available to the general populace. The ability to have tattoos that change their appearance depending on physiological conditions would open up new worlds of expression. Anyone who's read Nylund's "Signal to Noise" will remember the character Panda's always-changing eyelid tattoos. Very cool.

Re:Cosmetic applications

[BluBrick]

The ability to have tattoos that change their appearance depending on physiological conditions would open up new worlds of expression.

The Japanese had this in their traditional body art for many years until recently. It's a white ink that is almost transparent on pale skin, but becomes quite distinctly visible when the skin is blushed. IIRC, it was traditionally applied to women as an erotic decoration. When the woman was especially aroused, her skin would blush and her tattoo would light up like Las Vegas.

This particular tattoo ink is now extremely unpopular and may even be illegal because of its major downside - it's a lead-based pigment.

Perhaps this guy can shed more light on the topic.

Re:This should really be a great thing

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

I've been hearing about thise glucowatch for the better part of 12 years now. I work in the glucose monitoring industry, and this story has been popular for years. Every recent mention of I have seen shows that the precision is still poor, and you still need to perform daily finger-stick tests to calibrate the watch, so if you're looking to get away from sticking your finger, the glucowatch won't solve your problems.