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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."
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
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?
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
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?
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.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
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.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
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