Cost-Efficient Wearable Blood Glucose Monitoring Through Automated Intravenous Cannula Sampling

Frequent blood glucose monitoring is critical for patients receiving insulin therapy and intensive clinical care. Yet, current inpatient workflows rely predominantly on manual blood sampling or disposable sensing components, increasing clinical workload and delaying actionable feedback. Moreover, the overall cost of monitoring scales linearly with the number of tests performed. Although continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems offer a cost advantage in that sampling frequency does not directly increase per-use cost, they provide indirect measurements and are not universally suitable for inpatient settings. Existing automated blood analysis platforms also remain constrained by their reliance on single-use sensors or cartridges, which limits scalability and cost efficiency for high-frequency glucose testing in clinical environments. In this work, we present a costeffective, fully automated point-of-care system for frequent blood glucose monitoring based on intravenous (IV) cannula access. The proposed platform enables automated blood withdrawal, glucose measurement, sensor cleaning, and controlled push-back within a closed microfluidic system, allowing a single glucose sensor to be reused across multiple measurements without contamination or increased consumable cost. A functional prototype has been developed and validated using glucose standard solutions. Over a three-day evaluation period, the system used a single sensor and performed 72 glucose measurements with frequent 2-point calibrations for every 3 hours, showing a 97.2 % confidence interval in +-12% error range. These results indicate the feasibility of a reusable-sensor-based, fully automated IV cannula platform for frequent bedside glucose monitoring, offering a promising solution to reduce clinical workload and pertest cost while enabling high-frequency blood glucose assessment.