Development of automatic operated blood sampling system for portable type Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose device.

In this study, a new portable type Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) device, which is driven automatically from the blood sampling to the blood glucose measurement, is developed to establish the point-of-care technology in the ubiquitous medical care. It aims to overcome human errors due to the complicated manual operation of commercial SMBG devices. In this study, I mainly discuss the development of automatic operated blood sampling system. This system consists of Three Dimensional Blood Bessel Search (3D BVS) unit employing Near-Infrared Light (NIR) imaging and the stereo method, and automatic blood collection and transportation system. A prototype of the blood sampling system was examined its performance and confirmed the high accuracy in 1) blood vessel search, 2) punctuation and blood suction, and 3) transportation.