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Millions of people worldwide are affected by diabetes. While glucose sensing technology has come a long way over the past several decades, the current commercially available techniques are still invasive, often leading to poor patient compliance. To minimize invasiveness, focus has been placed on optical techniques to ascertain blood glucose concentrations. Optical polarimetry has shown promise and progress as a viable technique for glucose sensing. Recent developments in polarimetric glucose sensing have been focused on overcoming time varying corneal birefringence due to motion artifacts. Beyond corneal birefringence, the next hurdle toward making this approach viable is the ability to couple polarized light across the eye’s anterior chamber. The eye is ideally suited to couple light to the retina. The index mismatch between the air and cornea is partially responsible for the beam bending toward the retina and, while good for vision, it complicates our ability to couple light across the anterior chamber without using an index matching device when performing polarimetric glucose monitoring. In this report, we have designed and modeled a non-index matched coupling scheme constructed with commercially available optics. The optical ray tracing model was performed using CODE V to verify the feasibility of a reflective based non-index matched coupling scheme with respect to index of refraction and anatomical restraints. The ray tracing model was developed for a dual-wavelength system and the effect of refraction and reflection at each optical interface within the setup was evaluated. The modeling results indicate a reflective based optical coupling design could be added to existing polarimetric glucose systems thus removing the need for placing an index matched eye-coupling mechanism over the eye prior to data collection.
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