Good news for Indonesia! In 2018-2019 Google Science Fair, a 16-year-old female student from Indonesia has won a prestigious award.
Celestine Wenardy, the one and only Indonesian finalists, acquired Virgin Galactic Pioneer Award for her revolutionary invention. Accordingly, she invented an affordable noninvasive continuous blood glucose concentration monitoring via interferometry and thermal technology.
At first, the high school sophomore from the British School Jakarta, Indonesia, was inspired from the fact that diabetes has killed numerous people in Indonesia. Furthermore, she thought out loud of a way for people to measure their blood glucose level easily.
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According to her presentation, her invention can measure blood glucose level without having the need to draw blood. This, in her opinion, is important because blood drawing is uncomfortable for some people.
More importantly, her invented instrument is very affordable. The development of such instrument only costs US$ 63 in the future. In contrast, this is so dissimilar from current instruments which cost more than US$ 1.000.
Pertaining to how it works, the instrument uses two sensors to diagnose. Surprisingly, the result is highly valid and reliable for it achieves an R2 value of 0.843 through the usage of multiple sensors.
In the future, this might be a breakthrough in the medical technology advancement. Also, this might help to detect diabetes earlier and reduce the number of deaths caused by it.
Google Science Fair
Google Science Fair is an esteemed event for teens from around the world to solve a problem they care about using science, technology, engineering, and math. As its name, Google is the one which conducts the event.
This year, there are twenty worldwide finalists competing in this event. Celestine Wenardy is the one and only finalist coming from Indonesia.
There are six winners in respective categories. Each category only has one winner. To be precise, the Indonesian finalist won Virgin Galactic Pioneer Award.
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Other finalists who won other awards come from various countries. For example, the one who managed to get Google’s Grand Prize, Fionn Ferreira, comes from Ireland. Additionally, the boy conducted a project named an investigation into the removal of microplastics from water using ferrofluids.
Apart from them, there are four other winners with superb projects and/or products.
