Abstract:

Diabetes mellitus has become the fourth leading cause of death in United States, and statistics show an increasing rate of patients in Australia. Most of the patients are required to monitor their blood glucose levels up to four times a day, but with the currently available invasive methods, such as fingerstick test, are painful and expensive, which in turn make the patients reluctant to undergo regular monitoring. Thus, painless and cheap non-invasive methods for blood glucose detection should be developed.

The objective of this research is to model and numerical simulate non-invasive blood glucose detection strategy based on Raman spectroscopic signature of glucose. Raman signature of glucose being unique and different from that of other substances in blood makes it a good choice. However, being a nonlinear optical process, very high local photon density is required to initiate Raman scattering in glucose molecules. We propose a novel strategy where photonic density of states of light interacting with blood will be engineered using embedded photonic crystal structure. We propose to further enhance the Raman scattering process by strategically placing silver clusters inside the photonic crystal structure to initiate surface-enhancement effects due to plasmonic fields.