Blood sugar test: When and how to do it correctly

Do you know how to do it?
For someone suffering from diabetes, keeping a track of their blood sugar level is paramount. The amount of sugar in the blood is controlled by a hormone called insulin. In a diabetic patient, their body either does not make enough insulin or the insulin produced doesn't get utilised properly, which often leads to a spike in the blood sugar level. High blood sugar, if left untreated, can damage organs, increase the risk of heart attack, kidney disease and liver problem.

Constantly monitoring the blood glucose level helps to manage the health condition and prevent complications. Nowadays testing blood sugar has become easier with a portable blood glucose meter. You can test your sugar level anytime at your home with a simple blood sample test. We tell you the right time and method to measure your sugar level.
 
When to test your blood sugar

You can do the test multiple times a day to monitor the fluctuation, but it is important to consult your doctor about the frequency. Depending on your health condition, your doctor will tell you how often you should do it. You can do it:

Before meals and snacks

Before and after exercise

Before going to bed at night

Also, ask your doctor about your reasonable blood sugar range. Your doctor will tell your maximum and minimum level depending on the type of diabetes, age, pregnancy status, complications and overall health.

As per the American Diabetes Association (ADA), your general blood sugar level should be:

Between 80 and 130 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) or 4.4 to 7.2 millimoles per litre (mmol/L) before meals

Less than 180 mg/dL (10.0 mmol/L) 2 hours after meals

Here is how you should test your blood glucose correctly

Directions

Wash your hands and dry it properly.

Put a test strip into your meter.

With the help of your lancing device (needle provided with test kit) prick the side of your fingertip to get a drop of blood.

Touch and hold the edge of the test strip to the drop of blood.

Wait for a few seconds for the meter to show the results on the screen.
​The risks of self-testing

There are several benefits of self-testing, biggest being it is easy and convenient. But there are also some risks like:

Multiple punctures

Excessive bleeding

Lightheadedness or fainting

Blood collecting under your skin

Infection

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     

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New device to help people with swallowing problems

Here's the good news for the patients suffering from swallowing disorders. Scientists reveal a wearable monitoring device that will make the treatments easier and more affordable.

An associate professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences and an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering  have founded Curasis LLC to commercialise their wearable technology and move it as quickly as possible to clinics and people with swallowing difficulties.

"We want to provide a reliable, patient-friendly and affordable way to treat the millions of people with swallowing disorders," said the Prof. "Many devices to help these people are expensive, not able to be taken home and not accessible in many rural areas."

The researchers have created a skin-mountable sensor sticker that attaches firmly to the neck area and is connected with small cables to a wireless transmitter unit. The skin-mountable sensor sticker measures and records muscle activity and movement associated with swallowing.

The information is then sent wirelessly by a separate unit clipped on the wearer's shirt to software that stores it for later analysis by a doctor.

Successful completion of a swallow requires the precise coordination of more than 30 pairs of muscles of the head and neck, six pairs of cranial nerves, and complex circuitry in the brainstem and several brain areas.

Any disruption in these pathways can result in severe swallowing disorders.

"Our device is unique in that we specifically created it to work well with the small and intricate muscles associated with swallowing events," Lee said.

"The sensor sticker is stretchable and flexible to work well with the skin and curvilinear head and neck shape, while the connected unit has electronic chips and more rigid components," added the Prof.
The sensor stickers are disposable, designed with inexpensive components and meant to be used about 10 times before they are thrown away.

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This IIT Hyd device can alert doctors about heart diseases by monitoring ECG data in real-time

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad) have developed a low-power device that can monitor electrocardiogram (ECG) and alert patients and doctors in real-time about the risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). CVD tops the list of public health concern compared to other diseases and has almost become the primary cause of human deaths, as per a survey of the World Health Organisation (WHO). The main causes include changing trend in lifestyle, unhealthy eating habits, tobacco usage, low fruit and vegetable intake and lack of physical activity and lot of stress. These factors necessitate developing a personalised CVD monitoring device powered by battery backup and with a very low form factor to achieve unobtrusiveness that works under the emerging cyber-physical system setup.
The research was conducted by a team comprising Vemishetty Naresh (PhD, Research Scholar, Advanced Embedded Systems and IC Design Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering), IIT Hyderabad and Dr Amit Acharyya, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering. As a proof of concept demonstration, the researchers have taken healthy and various unhealthy cases from the Physionet database to validate the proposed method. Their research has been published recently in the peer-reviewed international journal Scientific Reports, an online open access, scientific journal published by prestigious Nature Research.
Speaking about the importance of this research, Dr Amit Acharyya said, "CVD is one of the deadliest disease and irrespective of the economy of the country people are getting affected by it. It is manifested in different forms necessitating the early diagnosis, therapy and prognosis. Hence the proposed work on the classification is going to be of immense help for the society."
In addition, they also worked on developing different classification techniques and integrating them to make a generic algorithm. A novel System-On-Chip (SoC) architecture is developed in a low complex way by resource sharing concept for the CVD automation. Thus the whole system can cover various ECG abnormalities and finally come up with the prototype board which looks similar to as a smartphone at the patient end.
Speaking about their plans to take this research to benefit the society at large, Vemishetty Naresh said, "There is an exponential increment in human mortality rate, due to the delayed diagnosis, lack of proper distribution of health care facilities and prognosis centers in the vicinity. There is a need of a robust automated device for the early detection of the vital abnormal ECG signals in chronic CVD patients."
This medical science and technological needs impose many challenges on such device development such as low power consuming system design trade-off between the on-board processing and RF (Radio Frequency) communication, low complexity analog front-end circuit design and energy harvesting or self-power mechanism to prolong battery life. Further, there is great necessity to develop a robust algorithm to find any desynchronisation in the ECG waves. With the present advancement in technology, there is a great scope for developing robust medical ECG devices in analysing the ECG signals and classify the patient condition. This method will predict the departure from the healthy condition to unhealthy condition corresponding to the CVDs.

How does the system work?
The researchers overcame the above mentioned challenges by proposing a novel System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture for CVD monitoring. Scrutinising the technical challenges like low-power and low-area for delivering reliable healthcare under resource constraints, they have proposed low-complex Boundary Detection (BD) and Feature Extraction (FE), low-complex f-QRS Detection and Morphology Identification (FDMI) architecture, Rule Engine (RE), and Token based compression technique. The aim of the researchers is to take this idea further to the system level from the concept and propose a low-complexity but medically reliable SoC architecture.
The above proposed methodologies are used to extract the essential clinical features from each ECG beat and compared with the standard values to give the binary classification as normal or abnormal. Many research articles had put thrust on studying the clinical features of ECG beats and the heart rate variability for the diagnosis. Despite these findings, it is difficult to derive an equivocal temporal relationship of these methodologies to predict arrhythmias. The prediction of ECG abnormalities associated with the change of morphology in the localised features (PR interval, QRS complex, QT interval) will allow the clinicians sufficient time to intervene to stop its escalation causing sudden cardiac death. 

"To mitigate the above limitations our attempt in this thesis is to propose a generalised Phase Space Reconstruction (PSR) based detection and classification of the CVD by exploiting the localised features of the ECG unlike the state-of-art PSR techniques," said one of the researchers. Since the aim was to do the real-time ECG classification on an edge-device that is running under resource constrained environment with scarcity of power and area, therefore the idea of the researchers was to propose a low-complexity yet accurate solution and therefore they adopted classical technique of localised features detection.
This research was partly supported by Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India under the ‘Internet of Things (IoT) Research of Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems (ICPS) Programme,' with the Project entitled ‘IOT Based Holistic Prevention and Prediction of CVD. 

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Fitness trackers more accurate in predicting patient health outcomes

Researchers found that fitness trackers can better estimate exercise capacity and determine the health status of patients, rather than the cliche 6-minute walk distance test doctors opt for.

Researchers said the test results are another example in how wearable and monitoring devices like Fitbits and Apple watches can be used in patient care to improve outcomes.

For patients, this means we can track their progress more frequently in a manner that's less expensive and more convenient than current standarised testing, said the lead researcher.

The 6 minute walk distance is an important, objective standard used to assess exercise capacity. Patients walk for 6 minutes and then based on how many meters they cover in that time, physicians can predict outcomes and mortality for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cardiovascular diseases.

Normally, the 6 WMD test is done every few months or once a year. Now, we may be able to measure patients on a regular basis and know if we need to intervene if their estimated 6 WMD by step count changes, said the Dr.

In the study, researchers conducted a 12-week, blinded, randomised, cross-over trial with 52 patients, a group that included adults with a history of respiratory problems during periods of elevated air pollution. Wrist step counters tracked patient steps for those 12 weeks, and patients also filled out respiratory symptoms questionnaires.

Researchers found they could effectively estimate a patient's 6WMD results by using step counters, instead of having patients come in a clinical setting to do the 6WMD test.

Instead of having one measurements every few months, you could have weekly measurements, and have information at disease progression at more frequent intervals. This is a significant improvement and enhanced convenience for our patients, said the Dr.

The implications? Using wrist step counters will allow physicians to track how their patients are doing, the progression of the disease and whether a patient requires immediate intervention.

Being able to distill step counts into this clinically important metric is a first step in being able to think about how to use step counters in order to better manage health and detect deterioration earlier, added the Dr.

 this is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   
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New AI-enabled system translates brain signals into speech

In a first, scientists have created an artificial intelligence (AI) based system that directly translates thoughts into intelligible, recognisable speech, an advance that may help people who cannot speak regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.

By monitoring someone's brain activity, the technology developed by researchers can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. 
 
The breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesisers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. 


It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world, researchers said.

"Our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one's voice due to injury or disease is so devastating," said a researcher.


"With today's study, we have a potential way to restore that power. We've shown that, with the right technology, these people's thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener," said  a principal investigator of the study.

Decades of research has shown that when people speak-or even imagine speaking-telltale patterns of activity appear in their brain. 

Distinct pattern of signals also emerge when we listen to someone speak, or imagine listening.
Experts, trying to record and decode these patterns, see a future in which thoughts need not remain hidden inside the brain-but instead could be translated into verbal speech at will.

However, accomplishing this feat has proven challenging. Early efforts to decode brain signals by researchers focused on simple computer models that analysed spectrograms, which are visual representations of sound frequencies.

However, because this approach has failed to produce anything resembling intelligible speech, the team turned instead to a vocoder, a computer algorithm that can synthesise speech after being trained on recordings of people talking.

"This is the same technology used by Amazon Echo and Apple Siri to give verbal responses to our questions," she said.

Researchers plan to test more complicated words and sentences next, and they want to run the same tests on brain signals emitted when a person speaks or imagines speaking. 

Ultimately, they hope their system could be part of an implant, similar to those worn by some epilepsy patients, that translates the wearer's thoughts directly into words. 

"In this scenario, if the wearer thinks 'I need a glass of water,' our system could take the brain signals generated by that thought, and turn them into synthesised, verbal speech," she said.

"This would be a game changer. It would give anyone who has lost their ability to speak, whether through injury or disease, the renewed chance to connect to the world around them," he said. 

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Painless way to monitor glucose For diabetics

Researchers have designed a microneedle patch for people with diabetes to enable them to monitor their glucose levels throughout the day in a "painless" manner. Continuous monitoring is a way to safely and reliably lower blood glucose - giving the user a full picture of their glucose levels throughout the day and helping them avoid severe hypoglycemia. 

But the currently used continuous glucose monitoring systems (known as CGMS) are uncomfortable since they require a minimum 7mm needle inserted into the skin. Owing to their size, they take measurements in the fat tissue - not the most ideal location. However, the new device, developed by researchers is 50 times smaller. 

When applied to a human participant's forearm, the combination of the patch and an extremely miniaturized three-electrode enzymatic sensor was found capable of correctly and dynamically tracking blood glucose levels over time, with a delay of about 10 minutes.

"Our solution is painless to the user. We measure directly in the skin, and there are no nerve receptors that detect pain - just a fine mesh of very tiny blood vessels," said a researcher.

Unlike commercially available CGMS which measure the subcutaneous fat tissue, the new device measures within the skin less than 1mm deep, he said.

This would offer an alternative to pricking one's fingers several times a day to take a blood test and the frequency of finger prick tests could be reduced with a glucose monitoring system, he noted.
The team has successfully tested the prototype of a microneedle patch on a human participant and the completion of a system for clinical tests is now underway.
 
THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.                                                                                
 PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO  VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                           https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com/                                                                                                                                                                             FOR INFO ABOUT KNEE REPLACEMENT, YOU CAN VIEW MY BLOG-                                               
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