Today in irresponsible #science marketing bullshit: #UWaterloo puts out a real turd of a press release, linked below.
The press release: "[our stuff] senses glucose levels for diabetics more accurately than ever before"
The actual research: basically a better antenna that can distinguish between distilled water and a ~25000 mg/dL glucose solution absent any other factors. For context: At around 500 mg/dL you're dead.
Link to the press release:
https://uwaterloo.ca/news/media/no-more-needles-tracking-blood-sugar-your-wrist
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Here's the plot from their paper. Note that the horizontal axis, showing glucose concentration, is labelled in mlligram per milliliter, not per deciliter as you'd use in medicine. 500 milligram per milliliter is halfway to a saturated solution.
Also note how whilie it improves total SNR, their metasurface tech actually worsens the system's sensitivity to glucose level. It's funny-sad to read how they argue around that in the paper.
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Since there's no reason to assume that the output from the off-the-shelf infineon mmWave radar chipset that they use interacts with glucose in particular in any meaningful way, from what I can tell they are effectively just measuring density. A 500mg/ml (~50%) solution of glucose in water has about 20% higher density than pure water.
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Note that nowhere in their paper do they claim that they are able to measure glucose concentration in a blood sample, much less in living tissue. Instead, their only actual claim is that in a lab setting, where there are no other variables, they can distinguish between pure water and a thicc glucose solution.
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This is cool research that they are doing, and the paper does not contain anything outright wrong. In the paper, the glucose monitoring stuff is presented as a purely hypothetical motivation, a "maybe one day we could use it for that" kind of thing.
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The way they spin that into basically "tomorrow you can buy this!" in the press release is pretty gross. I think press releases like this, and the resulting journalistic articles that regurgitate the overhyped claims, failing to notice the bullshit, are really harmful to science communication in general. This shit erodes trust, because it leads to an endless stream of hypey press releases with very little real-world results to show in the end.
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@jaseg and it should be said that researchers go home with the feeling that someone took their work and misrepresented it – not appreciating it. People, in general, are not getting their personal satisfaction from "Likes" or the pubsci equivalence, but from meaningful interaction with what they do.
It's not like the university was doing itself any favors there.
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@funkylab oh yeah, I’d be surprised if the researchers had much say in the way the university’s PR department spun this.
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@jaseg I don't know whether I'd put this all on the PR department. The professor seems to be happy to present the technology as wearable.
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@jaseg They have this dubious sentence, "It can be shown that the effective characteristics of the new dielectric medium (combination of the Pyrex beaker and pure water) is sufficiently close to the human body skin at 60 GHz.", that reads close to claiming the method can be applicable to humans. And to make it even worse, nobody in the peer review seems to have questioned this, or the glucose concentration shown in figure 11.
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@pi In my rough reading, I got the impression that the authors used that blood glucose scenario really only as motivation, so I could forgive the peer reviewers, who most likely have zero medical background in this case, for not bothering to look up realistic blood glucose concentrations and failing to pick up on those numbers. You’re right though that the authors are definitely skirting a line with that motivating example.
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