STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Stumptown Glucobots

Another Friday, another spring scoop! For the last several weeks we have been catching up with our STEM-In-Action grant recipient teams from our 2019 eCYBERMISSION year. If you aren’t familiar with the grant or what it entails, the U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) STEM-In-Action Grant awards eCYBERMISSION teams up to $5,000 to develop their projects into mature and scalable solutions in their community. Five teams all over the country were awarded this prize and each week we have been catching up with them to see how their projects have been progressing since the Fall. This week, we are headed to the West Coast to see what Portland’s own Stumptown Glucobots have been up to!

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We are the “Stumptown Glucobots,” a neighborhood-based eCYBERMISSION team from Portland, Oregon comprised of 7^th graders attending Stoller Middle School. We are on a mission to build a solution to measure blood sugar levels without using a single drop of blood!

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 100 million U.S. adults are now living with diabetes or prediabetes, and that number is expected to grow substantially by the year 2025. The amount of children with juvenile diabetes (Type One), has also grown to a staggering 200,000 kids, which is a dramatic increase compared to past years. We decided to set ourselves on a mission to build a “Glucobot”, a device that uses Near Infrared Sensors to measure blood sugar levels with near-perfect accuracy without using a drop of blood from the patient.

As part of our project, we had built a prototype Glucobot using a Raspberry Pi micro-computer and Sparkfun based Near Infrared Sensor AS7263. Since getting the STEM-In-Action grant from eCYBERMISSION, we started evolving our prototype to a substantial design that can be deployed to hospitals for data collections that can better improve the accuracy of our predictions.

We have made substantial changes to our prototype design and eliminated nearly 50% of the parts reducing the overall product cost. We all got trained in 3D printing designs during the last three months. With the latest edition of the Dremel printer to our team’s tools, we were able to create 3D printed designs to host the newly revised AS7265x triad sensor that supports higher Near-Infrared wavelengths.

We have also developed a new 3D casing design for the AS7265x sensor housing which reduces external light contributions during sensor readings, thereby improving overall reading accuracy.

We also visited Providence hospitals in Portland, Intel and other technology companies to further understand recent developments in sensor technology as well as share our project for additional feedback. Our future goals are to introduce this design in the market for hospitals so that we can collect more real and accurate data. We are planning on making many more 3D printed models, including a device supporting Bluetooth connectivity for hospital use.

Our biggest challenge was to perfect the linear regression model that is used to predict blood sugar levels based on Near Infrared sensor readings. We needed to collect dozens of samples to accurately convert NIR values to mg/dL values. A lot of the time, the data would be very inaccurate due to coding errors or just a lack of samples. We managed to overcome this challenge by taking as many samples as possible and proofreading our code multiple times.

We are most exciting about productizing our design and impacting the maximum amount of people positively. Seeing as our design’s final form has not yet been completed, we are happy to see the changes we’ve made take shape and change our solution for the better. The most ideal outcome for our project would be to streamline the process of creating the most efficient design possible and let every diabetic in need of our solution have access to our resources and technology to monitor blood sugar levels without a drop of blood.

Until then, please stay tuned!

-Team Stumptown Glucobots

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So amazing the advancements these 7^th graders are making to make it easier for people that suffer from diabetes or prediabetes! So many Americans and people across the world suffer from this disease, so their impact potential is global. Good luck to the team as they continue to perfect their ideas!

-Mission Control

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