Case Study: Lifescan Scotland achieves faster, more accurate blood-glucose test-strip design with COMSOL Multiphysics

Lifescan Scotland Ltd. uses multiphysics for product design and optimization

Lifescan Scotland Ltd., the Inverness-based developer and manufacturer of OneTouch® blood glucose monitoring systems and test strips, faced the challenge of designing highly engineered electrochemical sensors that must be fast, accurate, manufacturable, low-cost, and compliant with strict medical regulations. Traditional analytical PDE approaches could not capture the coupled mass diffusion, enzyme kinetics, and electrochemistry needed to optimize strip geometry and reagent chemistry, so the team turned to Comsol’s COMSOL Multiphysics to characterize and model their sensor designs.

Using Comsol’s COMSOL Multiphysics (with Heat Transfer, Batteries & Fuel Cells, Transport of Diluted Species and PDE tools), Lifescan implemented coupled multiphysics simulations, automated meshing, LiveLink for MATLAB GUIs, and client/server computing to run large models. The Comsol-based workflow enabled rapid model-based prototyping of chamber geometries and reagent compositions, improved understanding of signal features and sensitivity to manufacturing changes, and supported cost-effective optimization that agrees with experimental results — delivering faster development cycles, reduced manufacturing risk, and higher product design confidence.

Lifescan Scotland

Stephen Mackintosh

Senior Scientist