ICLAB encourages students to develop practical experience and offers practical student projects in Electrical Engineering and Microengineering. Graduate and undergraduate students interested in one of ICLAB’s fields of research are invited to send in a email of motivation with a CV to the responsibles of the project they are interested in.
General information
EPFL will cover the transportation fees from Lausanne to Neuchâtel for any student doing a semester project or master project at ICLAB.
Towards Compact Glucose Sensing Using Vibrational Imaging
Information
Project Type: Master Project
Contact Person: Assim Boukhayma
Publication Date: 06.08.2019
Location: EPFL Microcity, Neuchâtel
Keywords: Glucose sensing, light sensors, imaging
Description
With diabetes still not having a well-established cure, the regular monitoring of the blood glucose level remains the only way to avoid severe secondary health complication through controlled insulin administration. Today, invasive techniques like the fingerstick testing remain the only solutions allowing precise and reliable blood glucose monitoring for diabetic subjects.
The development of a non-invasive blood glucose monitoring technique would improve significantly the life quality of diabetic subjects and help early detection and prevention of diabetes for the healthy ones.
In this regard, vibrational spectroscopy, especially Raman scattering, has exhibited substantial promise due to its exquisite molecular specificity and minimal interference of water in the spectral profiles acquired from the blood-tissue matrix.
Raman spectroscopy as a probe of vibrational transitions has made a considerable progress thanks to the continuous development of laser sources in the visible range providing high intensity and coherent light. In addition, other vibrational spectroscopy schemes have been derived out of spontaneous Raman spectroscopy including non-linear techniques like stimulated Raman spectroscopy.
Project
The Raman signature of blood Glucose is well known and the detection of glucose concentration in fluid solution have been extensively published and used for industrial applications. The objective of this project is to explore the limits of Raman spectroscopy miniaturization to be used for mobile blood glucose sensing. For this purpose, the student needs to go through the following steps:
- Getting familiar with the theoretical principle of coherent and stimulated Raman spectroscopy
- Performing Raman spectroscopy on glucose solutions and specifying the limits of power and SNR
- Exploring the advantage of using the highly sensitive CMOS light sensor developed at ICLAB and the impact on required power and specifying the minimum requirements for a vibrational spectroscopy glucose sensor
Candidate
The candidate should preferable have the following skills:
- Experience with optical setups
- Some experience with lasers and lenses in visible domain
- Spectroscopy and particularly non-linear or Raman spectroscop
- Electronic circuits and systems engineering
- Understanding circuits (key words: PCB, LEDs, Circuits, Altium…)
- Programing in lab environment (key words: Labview, VHDL, FPGA…)