I’m talking about those machines we use at home to measure the amount of glucose in our blood. How does that little machine measure glucose? Does it count the glucose? How?
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If you are talking about the testing strips. The part of the strip where you place the blood contains an enzyme that reacts with the sugar in your blood. When it is inserted into the machine, the machine measures the concentration of the product of the enzyme reacting with the sugar and then uses that to calculate the concentration of sugar in your blood.
The strips where you drop blood contains chemicals that react with glucose. Once blood hits it, it gets activated and starts to react with the glucose in your blood. These chemical reactions generate energy and also forms a new product.
Depending on the device, it either quantifies the energy generated which is proportional to the glucose in your blood, or it quantifies the products produced which is also proportional to the glucose in your blood. It makes small calculations based on this information to obtain the blood glucose level.
Most glucometers today use an chemistry to create a tiny electric current that the meter can measure.
The test strips contain a capillary, a tiny tube that sucks in a specific amount of blood. The glucose in the blood reacts with chemicals in the test strip which generates an electric current. Since the amount of overall blood is always the same, only the amount of glucose in that blood varies and so does the current that is generated.
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