Monitoring a patient’s vital signs and other physiological parameters is a standard part of medical care, but, increasingly, health and fitness-minded individuals are looking for ways to easily keep their own tabs on these measurements. Enter the biometric watch. In a pair of papers published in The Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal Biomedical Optics Express, groups of researchers from the Netherlands and Israel describe two new wearable devices that use changing patterns of scattered light to monitor biometrics: one tracks glucose concentration and dehydration levels, and the other monitors pulse. The glucose sensor is the first wearable device that can measure glucose concentration directly but noninvasively, the authors say. And while other wearable devices have been made to monitor pulse, the authors claim their new design would be less sensitive to errors when the wearer is in motion, for example while walking or playing sports Both of the watches described in the two papers make use of the so-called “speckle” effect, the grainy interference patterns that are produced on images when laser light reflects from an uneven surface or scatters from an opaque material. When the material that is scattering the light is moving—say, in the case of blood flowing through the circulatory
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