Smart rings are everywhere: smart rings that can record your verbal notes and send them to your cellular telephone for transcription, smart rings that let users pose questions to AI and get answers via earbuds, and smart rings that help athletes reach their peak performance.
Then, of course, there are medical-monitoring smart rings that let users record the quality of their sleep, smart rings that let users choose their own bio-marker adventure by selecting whichever health apps they want, and smart ear-rings that let users check their own blood flow.
Now, engineers at the University of California at San Diego have developed a smart ring that, using osmosis, continuously measures the biomarkers of alcohol, glucose, ketone, lactate, Vitamin C (ascorbic acid), and uric acid, and transmits that data to a smartphone app.
In their Nature Communications paper, co-first authors Tamoghna Saha, Shichao Ding, and Siyu Qin (who work in the laboratory of Prof. Joseph Wang) explain that they have created “a compact, fully integrated smart ring capable of simultaneously monitoring multiple chemical biomarkers in real time – marking a true biochemical counterpart to existing smart rings.”
Saha’s team furthermore claims that their device “extends beyond commercial smart rings focusing on only biophysical signals, by enabling continuous assessment of biochemical changes and advancing the development of next generation personalized and miniaturized healthcare technologies.”
“Commercial rings only provide biophysical information,” says postdoctoral researcher Saha, “but they lack molecular information about biochemical markers that offers deeper insights about an individual’s health status.”
Through Saha’s painless, osmotic hydrogel perspiration-sampling method, his team’s ring doesn’t require users to exercise enough to start sweating. Therefore, users needn’t worry about constantly having to run, cycle, or wrestle to get valuable, never-ending medical monitoring that could protect them from the dangers of diabetes or ensure they’re getting sufficient nutrition.
That’s particularly good news for people who work sedentary jobs, who are physically unable to sweat or move, or who, y’know, want to sleep. As Wang explains, “A ring capturing dynamic molecular information in real time would be extremely useful for making informed decisions regarding health, diet, and lifestyle. For example, the ring’s ability to track both glucose and ketone continuously and simultaneously would greatly benefit optimal insulin dosing for the management of diabetes.”
In trials, the UC San Diego smart ring performed well compared with the type of continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) that people with type-1 diabetes use, and with ketone-tracking commercial blood meters. Clearly, swapping two devices for a single ring-sized unit fulfills two major requirements of wearable medical devices: convenience and discreetness.
In addition to convenience boosts such as 12-hour monitoring, the ring calibrates (with two months of calibration stability) to the user’s specific biomedical factors, providing personalized and therefore more accurate medical assessment of biomarker trends.
No one should underestimate the mortal significance of medical discreetness; researchers are well aware that many patients risk their own health due to the stigma associated with requiring medical help.
Source: UC San Diego
