Development of a blood extraction device for a miniature SMBG system

In this study, a vacuum driven blood extraction device for the self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG) was newly developed. The health monitoring system (HMS) for SMBG consists of a blood extracting system and a drug delivery system (DDS). Our HMS extracts the blood through a micro-needle and measures the blood sugar level accurately. The main purpose of this work in HMS development are, 1) minimally invasive blood extraction, 2) a handy type automatic blood extraction, and 3) a continuous measurement of the blood sugar level. We adopted a vacuum driven type blood extraction mechanism. The vacuum driven blood extraction unit consists of a) a puncture part to open the vacuum part, b) an extraction part, and c) a measurement part. The puncture and extraction parts consist of a minimally invasive micro-needle, whose inner diameter is less than 100 mu m and made of titanium alloy, and a vacuum chamber, which is covered by a very thin membrane. A SMA spring and two bias springs are employed to penetrate the blood vessel through the skin with the micro-needle, and to execute the punctuation to slash the membrane in order to open the vacuum chamber. The blood is extracted into the vacuum chamber, seeps into the unwoven cloth according to the capillary principle, and is finally deposited on the blood sugar level sensor. Results show, our vacuum driven blood extraction device succeeded in extracting 12.7 mu l of human blood within 2 seconds. The blood sugar level was measured successfully by using a glucose enzyme sensor. Finally, the availability of our HMS device was confirmed.