Recent incarnations of glucometers – the ubiquitous devices for diabetics that track blood sugar by measuring a small amount of blood – have recently forgone primary batteries in favor of rechargeable secondary batteries--specifically in the form of low-voltage Li-Ion.
Rather than using watch batteries, as personal glucometers have for many years, both hypodermic insulin pumps and hand-held devices, now recharge via USB with the dual benefit of making the retrieval of blood sugar information much easier. Additionally, the batteries easily upload to website tracking that can easily be accessed through the user’s phone or computer.
“They’d always require a separate USB dongle of some description, and I’d always lose the thing,” says Corbin Pratt, a type-one diabetic. “Even if I had it, it required an account for the brand’s website, which was really infrequently used. It was a lot of work just to get a visual representation of blood sugar patterns.”
While users still need an account to process the information, the information being held on a single device rather than requiring an additional scanning dongle makes forwarding glucose information to a digital graph much easier. The use of secondary batteries, and by extension, the use of USB, has made a marked improvement on the use of biosensors; but, can the same be said for other devices, like the insulin pump?
Insulin pumps, which intravenously deliver insulin via an infusion site in the skin, still require primary batteries.
“It’s really not the sort of thing you can wait around to charge, in the same way that you can with a phone. It’s very much attached to your body, and getting a full charge immediately with the insertion of a new battery works a lot better,” says Pratt. “The pump is picky about the brand of batteries you use; if you don’t use Duracell it can just kind of stop working on you. Still, while there are some things that USB would service, it’s nothing that requires an overhaul in the power source.”
With the ever-increasing prevalence of secondary batteries in biotechnology, the continued use of primary batteries is called into question, but they still provide a reliability that cannot be found with secondary batteries.