What is bullshit is the completely unwarranted conclusions in the title or in the quotes in the article. This is classic "science by press release".
If you notice in the paper, they didn't do any testing, at all, with actual humans (or animals) and their blood sugar levels. The paper is mainly about the design of this "metasurface" which they claim allows higher resolution and sensitivity of a millimeter-wave radar system. The leap from what they've done to "no more needles for diabetics" is about 100x of "draw the rest of the owl".
Again, to emphasize, I'm not denigrating the science they've done. I'm denigrating the hyping of it.
Thanks for calling this out.
That was also my impression after having skimmed their paper: the only link to glucose monitoring is that the authors mention a few papers on the topic to motivate their research.
And looking at the papers they cite, I see little evidence that this approach could work in practice in the near future. Most of the citations [2, 15, 16] are to their own work, which did not look at glucose monitoring in the human body.
This is not my field of expertise, and maybe I am misunderstanding the papers. But it seems that there is little evidence that non-invasive glucose monitoring via measuring dielectric properties works reliably in practice. No in-the-wild studies, no investigation of potentially confounding factors.
Take for example citation 22 from the paper. A study where the authors propose a new antenna design. They seem to measure how the pancreas changes size during insulin production by monitoring its dielectric properties. IIUC, they look for a dip in the frequency spectrum caused by absorption of a certain frequency band.
But their measurements show an even larger effect when measuring on the thumb instead of the pancreas. This effect is not explained at all. (My guess: after having patients fast for 8-10 hours, giving them glucose will have an effect on the whole metabolism, resulting in higher blood flow, and that's what they measured).
Also, while they operate the antenna in the GHz range, they use a cheap USB soundcard (sampling rate 44.1 kHz) for capturing the signal. I did not understand this at all. They also repeatedly use the term "dielectric radiation". Seems to be a rather uncommon term?
The "machine learning algorithms" mentioned in the title seem to be a simple linear regression?
They claim an accuracy of ~90% and show some sample results. The complete study data is only available upon request, however.
[22] S.J. Jebasingh Kirubakaran, M. Anto Bennet, N.R. Shanker,
Non-Invasive antenna sensor based continuous glucose monitoring using pancreas dielectric radiation signal energy levels and machine learning algorithms,
Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, Volume 85, 2023, 105072,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bspc.2023.105072
I don’t have access to the full text, but I loved this part:
> Commercial CGM devices have certain drawbacks in diabetic measurement during daily activities such as food intake, sleeping, exercise and driving. The drawbacks are continuous radiations from devices
So they think a drawback of CGM is the (Bluetooth) radiation, and their alternative is to zap the pancreas with, um, magic dielectric radiation? Or magic radiation that results in “dielectric” backscatter?
I do find myself wondering whether a watch- or patch-sized object could get a usable NMR signal from glucose. Maybe a neodymium magnet and a very carefully shaped probe antenna to compensate for the horribly nonuniform magnetic field? Maybe an AC field with no permanent magnet at all? I found a reference suggesting that measuring glucose in blood outside the body by 1T NMR is doable but marginal, so this may be a lost cause.
The paper is full text, fyi. You won't get any extra info about actual glucose measurements. The paper is all about their device idea engineering. The press release dose purport to show a pic of a supposed sensor and a vague claim of clinical trials.
Correct, but I'm extremely skeptical, and that sentence had my bullshit detector alarms screaming even louder:
> “We have a minimum viable product that’s already being used in clinical trials, and while there’s more work to be done, we’re much closer to a full marketable device,” Shaker said.
Absolutely no information about what this "clinical trial" entails, or what phase it was. Most importantly, to get an initial assessment of the accuracy of the device, no clinical trials are necessary - you simply need to do a test that compares the blood sugar reading from the device against the current gold standard, most likely first in some animal model.
If their device was really as far along as the title and quotes are implying, they would be showered with so much money it would make the Theranos peak valuation look small. The only evidence they've provided (which, again, I'm not saying is insignificant) is that the "metasurface" they have developed enhances the resolution and sensitivity of a radar system against a beaker of water.
It’s fair to be skeptical. Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it in action. There’s likely an unexplained catch or they wouldn’t have shared any hard data in the paper.
One possibility is that they want to sell this technology to a big company without publicly disclosing all their trade secrets. However, this research could have been sponsored by a public grant, which would have compelled them to share some information. Therefore, they published a paper that appears more like a patent application than a research paper with solid data. It’s still noteworthy that it was published in Nature.
> It’s still noteworthy that it was published in Nature.
FWIW, it was not published in 'Nature' but in 'Communications Engineering', a journal by Nature Portfolio (formerly known as Nature Publishing Group, part of Springer Nature). It is a new Open Access journal, established only in 2022. Given the track record of their 'Scientific Reports' journal [1], I would be rather cautious regarding the quality of the works published at 'Communications Engineering'.
IMHO, Nature Portfolio is doing their 'Nature' journal a disservice by hosting all of their journals at nature.com. I guess this is intentional, letting their less prestigious journals profit from Nature's prominence.
Well… yes. Looking at the article, it satisfies the MVP requirements for getting grant funding. A bar GlucoWatch cleared more than two decades ago, though it could never quite clear the bar of clinical viability.
I have probably seen "viable" overinterpreted 100s of times by now. Perhaps we need to re-interpret the 'V' in "MVP" as "VC-investable" or perhaps replace it with 'I' to be I)nvestible which gets you a more pronounceable "MIP" (and maybe, just maybe highlights uncertainty since all investment carries risk)? Happens to also abbreviate "Multum In Parvo" (Latin for "many/much in little") which is not even that far off from the semantic. ;-)
Indeed, and for different audiences, you need to be ready to present your MIP with different levels of detail. I propose we call this new process... MIP mapping. :p
To clarify, the actual science they did is interesting (to me at least, as someone not in the field). The paper is linked here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00194-4
What is bullshit is the completely unwarranted conclusions in the title or in the quotes in the article. This is classic "science by press release".
If you notice in the paper, they didn't do any testing, at all, with actual humans (or animals) and their blood sugar levels. The paper is mainly about the design of this "metasurface" which they claim allows higher resolution and sensitivity of a millimeter-wave radar system. The leap from what they've done to "no more needles for diabetics" is about 100x of "draw the rest of the owl".
Again, to emphasize, I'm not denigrating the science they've done. I'm denigrating the hyping of it.