IPB Students Detect Diabetes Disease Easily and Quickly Using Urine
Diabetes is one of the most common diseases suffered by the people of Indonesia after heart disease. Recorded in 2017, Indonesian society suffering diabetes reached 10.3 million people. International Diabetes Federation (IDF) projected that the number of diabetics in Indonesia will continue to grow. These data did not include patients who have not been diagnosed clinically.
Most people are less reluctant to check clinically because the cost for diabetes diagnosis is not cheap and the test takes much time. This polemic motivated three students from the Physics Department of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (FMIPA) of Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) to create a diabetes detector using urine. These three students are Siti Afraghassani, Sejahtera and Indah Lisnawati Hapsari. They succeeded in creating a detector device called "As-Sukaru" which was designed to detect blood sugar levels using urine easily and quickly.
"Detection of diabetes in general uses a tool that can cause pain and even trauma to the patient. In addition, the cost is also expensive. Thus, a simple and cheap tool to detect blood sugar levels is needed," said Siti, the leader of the team.
This detector device is fiber-optic based that can detect urine glucose. It uses carbon nanoparticle material (carbon dot), doped by copper as a material sensitive to glucose. These materials are superimposed on the fiber-optic core as a substitute for cladding. In addition, this tool also features Light-Emitting Diode (LED) as a light source and photodetector to detect light that has passed through the optical fiber.
How As-Sukkaru works are quite simple. The new cladding-coated optical fiber is later immersed in the urine containing glucose. When the new cladding interacts with glucose, the optical properties of copper-doped carbon cladding will change, which lead to the change of the spreading of light within the optical fiber.
In principle, the light from the LED that is passed will go through the optical fiber and be captured by the detector at the other end. This happens because the intensity of light which passed through the optical fiber is proportional to the glucose concentration.
"The tension result will determine the glucose levels in urine which is displayed on the LED. The greater the voltage then the higher the glucose levels in the urine will be," she concluded.
This As-Sukkaru tool is currently included in the Student Creativity Program (PKM), guided by a lecturer from the Physics Department of IPB, Dr. Akhiruddin Maddu, M.Si. (**/ZSP/Zul)
