The Occuity Indigo, currently know internally as the G1 project, is Occuity's solution to one of the world's most important healthcare challenges - non-invasive glucose monitoring for diabetes. We sat down to speak to a key member of the team working on the project, Occuity's Senior Development Engineer, Lesley Parry-Jones.
But first, let's get Lesley to explain what the G1 project actually is and the technology behind this innovative device that is being developed to provide a non-invasive, pain-free solution to blood glucose monitoring.
"The G1 is our first generation device on our way to developing a non-invasive blood glucose monitor, which aims to deliver a glucose reading by measuring properties of the eye. More specifically, using the premise that refractive changes of the aqueous humour can be used to determine blood glucose levels."
Interestingly, many indicators of a particular condition, in this instance, diabetes, can be seen in the eye before anywhere else in the body. The eye represents a good place to look because it has many unique properties. It's the only place where we can see into the body and it is also a relatively stable environment. With this knowledge in mind, the goal of this project is to design a device that takes a measurement buy simply shining a light into an individual's eye, and then performs a calculation to determine the refractive index of the aqueous humour and by calibration, glucose levels in the blood.
At this stage of the project, the aim is to continue the development of our technology, building on the results from our early proof of principle, improving the performance in order to demonstrate we can measure clinically significant glucose levels to the required accuracy. Lesley explained:
Currently we're using a benchtop system in the lab. We're taking a number of cuvettes with different glucose solutions and using our prototype devices to determine very low concentrations of glucose. The next step is then to show this proof of principle once again but this time by measuring on eyes. At first, we will primarily be doing this on our own eyes, but as we progress we will test on the wider Occuity team."
Occuity is building an expert team of leading engineers to work on the G1 project, headed up by Robin Taylor, Occuity's CTO and co-founder.
Our Chief Optical Engineer, James Reynolds, plays a key role in the development of the G1 project. As an optical specialist James has been instrumental in the development of the technology. He has considerable mathematical aptitude and has used this extensively in algorithm design and development, mathematical modelling, and data analysis.
Leading on electronics is Guy Mundy, our Principal Electronics Engineer. He has had a long involvement in the medical industry, particulalry in the design of medical instrumentation including conventional enzyme based Glucose monitors.
One is one of the newer additions to the team is Michael Madekurozwa as our Image Processing Engineer. Michael has a very broad range of skills and is heavily involved in the testing, data analysis and algorithm development.
The next steps on the G1 project are to continue through design, build and test cycles moving onto a next generation design that we hope will both improve performance and significantly reduce the size of the instrument, moving us closer to the compact Indigo design concept.
The G1 project is one that all the team here at Occuity are passionate about and often gets our engineers animated because, as Lesley concludes,
"The work we're doing today is really important. It's not only great to work on cutting edge technology, but it's the thought that, once our device has gone through all the testing and validations, it really could help millions of people all over the world to replace the painful invasive glucose monitoring tests they currently use with a solution that is completely pain-free."
To learn more about the Occuity Indigo Glucose Monitor click here
Please note the Occuity Indigo Glucose Monitor is still in the research and development phase and not available for sale.