Design and Testing of Diffuse Reflectance Sensor for Continuous Monitoring of Cutaneous Blood Perfusion

A dual-wavelength reflectance optical sensor for monitoring cutaneous blood perfusion is presented as a part of multisensor glucose monitoring system. A Monte-Carlo simulation of partial differential pathlengths has been used for the optimization of the distance from light source to detector. The simulation indicated that the light pathlength within the upper vascularised skin layers increases before reaching saturation at separation distances larger than 3 mm. Thus the sensor sensitivity does not benefit from larger source-detector distances. At the same time with a higher separation of the detector from the source, the intensity exponentially decreases while undesirable sensitivity to the muscle perfusion increases. The hardware prototype has been developed based on the simulation findings and tested in a laboratory setting and in a home use study by patients with diabetes. For both testing procedures the optical sensor demonstrated high sensitivity to perfusion changes. The effect of initial cutaneous blood increase under the sensor has been observed which can be associated with pressure-induced vasodilation as a response to the sensor application.