A personalized model and optimization strategy for estimating blood glucose concentrations from sweat measurements

Background and objective: Diabetes is one of the four leading causes of death worldwide, necessitating daily blood glucose monitoring. While sweat offers a promising non-invasive alternative for glucose monitoring, its application remains limited due to the low to moderate correlation between sweat and blood glucose concentrations, which has been obtained until now by assuming a linear relationship. This study proposes a novel model-based strategy to estimate blood glucose concentrations from sweat samples, setting the stage for non-invasive glucose monitoring through sweat-sensing technology. Methods: We first developed a pharmacokinetic glucose transport model that describes the glucose transport from blood to sweat. Secondly, we designed a novel optimization strategy leveraging the proposed model to solve the inverse problem and infer blood glucose levels from measured glucose concentrations in sweat. To this end, the pharmacokinetic model parameters with the highest sensitivity were also optimized so as to achieve a personalized estimation. Our strategy was tested on a dataset composed of 108 samples from healthy volunteers and diabetic patients. Results: Our glucose transport model improves over the state-of-the-art in estimating sweat glucose concentrations from blood levels (higher accuracy, p<0.001). Additionally, our optimization strategy effectively solved the inverse problem, yielding a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.98 across all 108 data points, with an average root-mean-square-percent-error of 12%±8%. This significantly outperforms the best sweat-blood glucose correlation reported in the existing literature (0.75). Conclusion: Our innovative optimization strategy, also leveraging more accurate modeling, shows promising results, paving the way for non-invasive blood glucose monitoring and, possibly, improved diabetes management.