Hindawi Publishing Corporation

Advances in Electronics
Volume 2014, Article ID 406257, 5 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/406257

Research Article
Blood Glucose Measurement Using Bioimpedance Technique

D. K. Kamat,1,2 Dhanashri Bagul,2 and P. M. Patil3

1
SCOE, Pune 411041, India
2
Department of E & TC, Sinhgad Academy of Engineering, Pune 411048, India
3
KJ’s Educational Institutes, Pune 411048, India

Correspondence should be addressed to D. K. Kamat; dkkamat@gmail.com and Dhanashri Bagul; dhanashribagul@gmail.com

Received 17 July 2014; Revised 8 December 2014; Accepted 8 December 2014; Published 28 December 2014

Academic Editor: Meiyong Liao

Copyright © 2014 D. K. Kamat et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Bioimpedance measurement is gaining importance in wide field of bioresearch and biomedical systems due to its noninvasive
nature. Noninvasive measurement method is very important to decrease infection and physical injuries which result due to invasive
measurement. This paper presents basic principle of bioimpedance along with its application for blood glucose analysis and effect
of frequency on impedance measurement. Input from bioimpedance sensor is given to amplifier and signal conditioner AD5933.
AD5933 is then interfaced with microcontroller LPC1768 using I2C bus for displaying reading on LCD. Results can also be stored
in database using UART interface of LPC1768.

1. Introduction a result, at low frequency, impedance is resistive in nature

and at high frequency it has a resistive as well as a reactive
Impedance of any material can be defined as the opposition component [1] (see Figure 1).
offered by material to the electric current flowing through The incidence of diabetes is increasing worldwide every
it. It can be formulated as the frequency domain ratio of year [2]. Therefore, it is important to control as well as
voltage to current. Impedance can also be represented using to treat diabetes. There are various invasive and nonin-
resistance and reactance. Every material shows property to vasive methods available for blood glucose measurement.
dissipate energy and to store energy. Reactance (𝑋𝑐) indicates Glucometer which depends on radio wave transmission
energy storage in material whereas resistance (𝑅) is indicator uses continuously transmitting and receiving antenna. The
of energy dissipation [1]. transmitting antenna sends a signal of frequency in a range
When electricity is passed through body, two types of from 5 GHz to 12 GHz while receiving antenna monitors
resistances that is capacitive 𝑅 (reactive) and resistive 𝑅 signal attenuation to determine the blood sugar level. The
(resistance) are offered by body, where capacitance arises due main drawback of radio wave transmission is the requirement
to cellular membrane and resistance arises due to body water of high frequencies which helps to minimize influence of the
(intracellular or extracellular water). Cell membrane con- skin and to improve the accuracy of measurement results [3].
sists of a layer of nonconductive lipid material sandwiched Another glucometer based on photoplethysmography
between two layers of conductive protein molecules. High method uses principle of infrared absorption measurement.
reactance value indicates good health and cell membrane This method uses the concept that the blood with increased
integrity. Cell membrane structure makes them behave as sugar level has higher absorption rate of infrared radia-
capacitors when alternating current is applied to it. Hence tion than human skin. Requirement of additional sensor
impedance of tissue varies with frequency. At high frequency, for detecting heart rhythm is the main drawback of such
current can flow through both intra- and extracellular water measurement methods [4]. The change in glucose level can
which means that it can penetrate the cellular membrane be detected using electrode sensor by measuring changes
while at low frequency current cannot penetrate cellular in conductivity and permittivity of measuring component
membrane so it flows only through extracellular fluid. As [5]. But the main drawback of this type of measurement
2 Advances in Electronics

(a) (b)

Figure 1: Current flow through body: (a) low frequency and (b) high
frequency.
Figure 3: LPC1768 ARM Cortex board.

Bioimpedance
Bioimpedance sends measured data to PC by using UART interface where
electrode (sensor) amplifier and signal data is stored and further processed.
conditioner AD5933

2.1. Microcontroller Cortex LPC1768 M3. The LPC1768 is an

ARM Cortex-M3 32 bit microcontroller which is designed
Personal computer Microcontroller ARM for embedded applications which require a high level of
cortex LPC 1768 integration as well as low power dissipation. Here, UART is
used for downloading the program and for PC interface. The
Figure 2: Block diagram of system. communication between AD5933 and controller is through
I2C bus. LPC1768 works at a maximum operating frequency
of 100 MHz. Figure 3 shows hardware of LPC 1768. The ARM
Cortex-M3 CPU has a 3-stage pipeline and uses Harvard
system is the design of interdigital electrode sensor which is architecture with separate local instruction and data buses
complicated and very expensive; also the sensor impedance as well as a third bus for peripherals. The I2C interfaces
depends on frequency so it is not convenient to use this of LPC1768 I2C are byte oriented and have four operating
parameter for blood glucose level estimation. In this paper, we modes: master transmitter mode, master receiver mode, slave
have discussed blood glucose measurement system which is transmitter mode, and slave receiver mode [6].
more accurate and less expensive as it is using AgCl electrodes
[2].
2.2. Bioimpedance Amplifier. Bioimpedance amplifier is heart
of impedance measurement system. Impedance converter
2. Methodology and network analyzer AD5933 functions as signal conditioner
for bioimpedance signal. Low noise voltage reference IC
The measurement environment for continuous and non- AD820 and low power amplifier IC ADR 423 act as sup-
invasive monitoring of the impedance for blood glucose porting blocks for signal amplification and noise reduction.
measurement has been developed. The block diagram of the Figure 5 shows hardware for bioimpedance amplifier and
proposed measurement system, shown in Figure 2, consists signal conditioner AD5933. A precision, low power FET input
of the bioimpedance electrodes, integrated circuit AD5933, op amp AD 820 which can operate from a single supply of
microcontroller LPC1768, and a personal computer. Each 5 V to 36 V, or dual supplies of ±2.5 V to ±18 V. In the AD820,
block of system is discussed in detail in the following sections. N-channel JFETs are mainly used for providing a low offset,
The integrated circuit AD5933 is the core of the proposed low noise, high impedance input stage which is required by
measurement system (Figure 4). Bioimpedance electrodes most of the embedded applications. It also keeps low noise
are used for measurement of the impedance. Impedance performance to low frequencies. Low noise performance, low
is calculated by the microcontroller LPC1768 through I2C input current, and current noise are features of the AD820
interface. The microcontroller sends this measured data to which contributes negligible noise for applications [7, 8].
a personal computer, where we can store data, using a Integrated circuit AD5933 consists of the various blocks
serial interface UART. The microcontroller also provides an such as an input signal generator, a 12-bit A/D converter, a
initial configuration of the integrated circuit AD5933 which DFT (discrete Fourier transform) circuit, a thermal sensor,
includes mainly setting the frequency and amplitude of the and I2C interface. The function of generator is to supply a
input signal used for measurement of unknown impedance. sine wave input signal of certain frequency and amplitude
The ARM Cortex LPC1768 microcontroller also controls time at the output VOUT. Unknown impedance to be calculated
slots during which the measurements are performed. When is connected between VOUT and VIN terminals. Therefore,
microcontroller is done with measurement in respective time magnitude and phase of the current flowing through a load
slot, it reads the data from AD5933 by using I2C interface and depend on its impedance. The current is then transformed
Advances in Electronics 3

5 V USB or Ultra precision, low noise

VDD ref voltage reference
Vin SCL To I2C bus
Vout Impedance converter
} of LPC
and network analyzer 1768
SDA

Precision, low Precision crystal

power amplifier 16 MHz

Figure 4: Block diagram of bioimpedance amplifier.

(PGA), antialiasing filter, and ADC are main constituents

of receiving stage of AD5933. This receive stage obtains
input current signal from the impedance which is unknown
then performs signal processing followed by digitization of
the result. An external reference clock or internal oscillator
provides clock for DDS [9].
The DFT operation is as follows.
A DFT is estimated for each frequency point in the sweep.
The AD5933 DFT algorithm is expressed using following
equation:
1023
Figure 5: PCB of the realized monitoring system bioimpedance 𝑋 (𝑓) = ∑ (𝑥 (𝑛) (cos (𝑛) − 𝑗 sin (𝑛))) , (3)
amplifier with signal conditioning circuit. 𝑛=0

where 𝑋(𝑓) is the power in the signal at the frequency point

𝑓. 𝑋(𝑛) is the ADC output. cos(𝑛) and sin(𝑛) are the sampled
to voltage that is converted into a digital signal by the test vectors provided by DDS core at the frequency point 𝑓
digital to analog converter. The DFT circuit provides discrete [9].
Fourier transform of the converted impedance signal. This
will lead to measurement of real and imaginary parts which
are measured. Functional block diagram of AD5933 is shown 3. Impedance Measurement
in Figure 6 [9]. The readings for impedance measurement are taken in
The obtained response signal from the impedance is then the measurement frequency range of 10 kHz to 100 kHz.
sampled by the on-board discrete Fourier transform (DFT) Electrical contact with the body was made using silver
and ADC. This operation returns a real (𝑅) and imaginary (𝐼) electrodes. In order to increase the accuracy and to minimize
data-word at each output frequency. Impedance magnitude noise in measurement, high precision impedance converter
and phase are then easily calculated using the following system, AD5933, is used. Then the body part, which is
equations: connected between input and output ports of electrodes,
is excited with different frequencies. The current which is
Magnitude = √𝑅2 + 𝐼2 (1) the response from the body is then converted into voltage
𝐼 using a transimpedance amplifier. The output voltage of this
Phase = tan−1 . (2) transimpedance amplifier is then sampled and processed by a
𝑅 DSP engine of AD5933 at each frequency of excitation. Both
Once calibration is done, the magnitude of the impedance the real and imaginary components were stored in two 16-bit
and relative phase of the impedance at each frequency point registers of AD5933. The stored data in each of these registers
along the sweep can be easily calculated. This is done off chip must be read after each ADC conversion to get impedance
using content of real and imaginary register, which can be reading. These results which contain real and imaginary parts
read from the serial I2C interface [9]. are then read by the microcontroller using I2C and are further
There are two stages of operation of AD5933, namely, processed and displayed on a personal computer [1].
transmit stage and receive stage. The excitation signal
required for transmit stage is given by DDS technique. 4. Result
AD5933 has an in built 27-bit accumulator DDS core in the
transmit stage. At a particular frequency this DDS core pro- Normal glucose level for healthy human being is 4.4 to
vides on-chip output excitation signal. Input current signal 6.1 mmol/L. To study low as well as high blood glucose
is provided from unknown impedance to receive stage. The level, graph is plotted in the range of 4 to 6.8 mmol/L. The
current to voltage amplifier, a programmable gain amplifier dependency of impedance on blood glucose level is initially
4 Advances in Electronics

MCLK AVDD DVDD

DDS core −
DAC
Oscillator (27 bits)
+ Rout Vout

SCL Temperature
I2C interface sensor Z(𝜔)
SDA

Real Imaginary AD5933

RFB
register register

1024-point DFT
Vin
−
ADC Gain
(12 bits) LPF +
VDD/2
AGND DGND

Figure 6: Functional block diagram of AD5933.

100 because the highest scattering of points of measurement

90000 results is observed in this range of frequencies. So frequencies
outside this range are not used in further measurement.
Impedance (Ω)

70000
5. Conclusion
50000 Study of impedance blood glucose level results and its graph-
ical representation shows that noninvasive method can be
used for accurate measurement. For accurate measurement, a
30000 system is designed using AD5933. Use of noninvasive method
50 60 70 80 90 100 for blood glucose level estimation eliminates continual finger
Frequency (kHz) pricking and risk of infection. It is determined from the
4.0 mmol/L 5.6 mmol/L results that impedance depends on blood glucose level. The
4.4 mmol/L 6.0 mmol/L achieved results have proven that the accuracy of results,
4.8 mmol/L 6.4 mmol/L input signal voltage, and frequency ranges are suitable for
5.2 mmol/L 6.8 mmol/L biomedical monitoring applications.
Additionally, the proposed measurement system is ver-
Figure 7: Impedance dependence on frequency and blood glucose
satile, flexible, and easy to be used for different measure-
level in a range from 50 kHz to 100 kHz.
ment approaches like heartbeat, ECG, blood pressure, skin
impedance for cancer detection, and so forth. This developed
measurement system will offer new approaches and oppor-
tunities to noninvasive biomedical systems in the field of
determined using readings obtained from ACCU-CHEK medicine and other useful areas.
glucometer that is invasive measurement of glucose level. The
results obtained from blood glucose measurement system are
compared with readings obtained from invasive glucometer
measurements. Measurements of blood impedance at various Conflict of Interests
frequencies starting from low frequency to high frequency The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests
are carried out. Impedance measurement of several subjects regarding the publication of this paper.
at various frequencies is done to study possibility of change
of blood glucose level.
Impedance measurement of eight subjects is carried out
at different frequencies. The results of impedance at different References
blood glucose levels are presented in Figure 7. It can be seen [1] E. R. Jasmine Rose, D. Pamela, and K. Rajasekaran, “Apple
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Advances in Electronics 5

[2] V. Pockevicius, V. Markevicius, M. Cepenas, D. Andriukaitis,

and D. Navikas, “Blood glucose level estimation using interdig-
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[3] M. Hofmann, T. Fersch, R. Weigel, G. Fischer, and D. Kissinger,
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[6] Datasheet, “Analog Devices,” http://www.analog.com/static/
imported-files/data sheets/LPC1768.pdf.
[7] Datasheet, “Analog Devices,” http://www.analog.com/static/
imported-files/data sheets/AD820.pdf.
[8] Datasheet, “Analog Devices,” http://www.analog.com/static/
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[9] Datasheet, “Analog Devices,” http://www.analog.com/en/rfif-
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