Advances in the development of devices for noninvasive glycemia monitoring: who will win the race?

The development of a reliable method for noninvasive glycemia monitoring would have a tremendous medical and social impact for the management of diabetes, due to its high and increasing prevalence. This is indeed a topic of great interest, and one that is rapidly evolving. Some noninvasive glucose meters that entered the European and/or US market in recent years are described: Diasensor (based on near infrared spectroscopy), Pendra (based on impedance spectroscopy), and GlucoWatch (based on reverse iontophoresis). Unfortunately, none of these is currently available on the market anymore. However, some promising new device prototypes (not on the market yet) have emerged in recent months: TANGTEST Blood Glucose Meter (based on an optical technology), RIGMD (based on reverse iontophoresis), Aprise (based on photoacoustic technology), and Sentris-100 (based on optical coherence tomography). In the clinical studies reported in the literature, these prototypes generally showed good performance in terms of accuracy in glycemia measurement, with agreement with traditional glucose measurement techniques of up to 99% (in terms of measurement data pairs falling within Zone A and B of the Clarke error grid). Thus, though great efforts in research are still needed, the goal of noninvasive glycemia monitoring may be reached in a near future.