Low-cost, painless: BITS Hyderabad’s smartwatch-based wearable monitors blood sugar via sweat

Hyderabad: In a promising breakthrough for diabetes care, researchers at BITS Pilani's Hyderabad campus have developed a smartwatch-based wearable device that can monitor blood glucose levels using sweat, offering a non-invasive, low-cost, and painless alternative to conventional finger-prick methods.

The diagnostic platform, developed by PhD scholar Abhishek Kumar and his mentor Prof. Sanket Goel, Principal Investigator at the Microfluidics and Nanoelectronics Lab, is now being steered toward commercialisation through their startup, Cleome Innovation. The startup, a spin-off from the BITS Hyderabad lab, aims to bring the wearable to market for proactive diabetes management.

The Startup is working to bring the wearable device to the healthcare market for proactive diabetes management, Abhishek Kumar said.

"In my family, even around, I have seen diabetes patients. My father, my grandfather, my grandmother, and many people are diabetes patients. So I used to test them using that finger-prick method ( to draw blood for a glucometer). And I literally sometimes used to feel their pain," Kumar told PTI when asked why he chose to innovate the non-invasive method.

One of the most significant features of the platform is its cost-effectiveness and the team deliberately engineered the platform to be scalable, low-cost, and reliable. Each component has been selected to minimise cost while maintaining performance, said Abhishek Kumar.

The wearable can detect not only glucose levels, but also uric acid and lactate, which are also important metabolic parameters, the research scholar said.

According to him, as per the sample which they tested, it has achieved a good accuracy of around 97 to 98 per cent currently.

Kumar said that after clinical validation of the product, it would be submitted for regulatory approvals before going into commercialisation.

"The first trials may start in six months from now. So altogether it may take one year to get into commercial production," he added.

This work is a significant improvement from a turnkey, fully automated, self-testing diagnostic platform capable of detecting key diabetes-related biomarkers, but from urine and sweat samples, offering a painless, low-cost alternative to conventional testing methods.

The study has been recently published in the Lab on a Chip journal by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), prof Goel said.

Looking forward, the research team is working on translating the system into wearable formats, such as patch-based or flexible skin sensors, to enable continuous and real-time monitoring of multiple analytes, a step toward personalised, on-the-go health tracking, the professor further said.

"Diabetes isn't just about glucose; complications can arise silently and early. By monitoring additional markers like lactate and uric acid, we gain a more complete picture of a patient's metabolic condition. Our system does this non-invasively, affordably, and in real time without requiring blood samples. Costing around Rs 2,500, the device continuously delivers results and is designed not just to replace finger-prick tests, but to enable broader metabolic monitoring using simple biofluids like sweat," said Prof. Goel.

The team is anticipating working with the industry for technology transfer or enhancement, he added. PTI