From ancient observation to a breakthrough six decades in the making.
Blood Sugar Awareness Quest —552 BC to Now
Humanity has known about elevated blood sugar for over 2,500 years. The methods of detection have evolved. The fundamental problem — pain, blood, and inconvenience — never did.
552 BC — Ants attracted to urine — the first indicator of a “sweet disease”
150 AD — Smell, taste, and color of urine used to diagnose diabetes
1941 — Chemical analysis of urine — copper reagent in a cup
1957 — Glucose oxidase strip — urine, no cup required
1964 — Drawn blood analyzed by color change on a strip
1987 — Enzyme electrode strip — drawn blood, faster result
2013 — Flexible cannula needle — glucose catalyzed to peroxide, electrically sense 2018 — Surgical optical implant—fluorescence of glucose molecules in interstitial fluid
2024 — Non-invasive optical — narrow-band laser absorption spectroscopy. No blood. No pain. Just your number.
Jake — The Scientist
Dr. Jacob Wong earned his physics doctorate with two Nobel laureates among his signatories. Princeton. Stanford. A career built on making the invisible visible — measuring what others said could not be measured. His founding insight: every molecule has an optical fingerprint. Find it precisely enough, and you can count it.
Jake — The Builder
Great science means nothing if it cannot be manufactured. Jake spent decades proving he could build real instruments and drive them to mass-market price points — from hospital rack equipment to a device you hold in your hand.
HP — Capnometer — CO₂ sensing for clinical anesthesia. $25,000 → $6,500
Telaire — Handheld CO₂ monitor. $6,500 → $800
Airware — Indoor air quality sensor. $800 → $250
Miners — Methane safety sensor for underground mining. $250 → $100
1992 — First Look into Skin
Two physicians from the Sansum Diabetes Research Institute visited Jake’s laboratory. They asked a simple question: could infrared optical sensing — the same physics Jake used for gas — be applied to human tissue to measure blood sugar without drawing blood? Jake had never looked into skin before. He looked. He saw a path. Early patents were filed. But the lasers of the era were too broad, too expensive, and too unstable. The project paused — but it never left his mind.
2003 — Airware & The Partnership
Thomas Campbell left Teledyne — forty years of hardware development, high-reliability and high-volume commercial electronics — to co-found Airware with Jake. Their first major mission: bring methane sensing to twenty million coal miners going underground every day in China without proper safety equipment. The economics were compelling. The insurance savings alone could fund the sensors. The mine owners decided otherwise — better their workers not know about the methane. The project died. The partnership did not. Thomas and Jake had built something more durable than a product: a shared commitment to technology that protects human lives.
The Resurrection — 2016
Dr. John Park — a clinician who knew Jake’s early glucose patents — rekindled the question during a medical visit. The timing was no longer premature. The laser landscape had transformed.
1990s — NIR narrowband lasers: $50,000+
2000s — NIR narrowband lasers: $25,000
Early 2010s — NIR narrowband lasers: $10,000
Mid 2010s — NIR narrowband lasers: $2,000–$5,000
Today — Well below — driven by LIDAR, AR glasses, and optical AI compute
LIDAR, AR glasses, and optical processing for AI telecom drove narrowband NIR laser costs below the threshold that makes a consumer device viable. The Baylor University spectroscopy study — commissioned and funded by Airware — confirmed the foundational science: weak second-overtone glucose absorption peaks are distinct and measurable. Dose response was achieved in a complex matrix of rabbit blood. The path was clear.
2017 — DILAST is Born
Direct Infrared Laser Absorption Spectroscopy Technique. Invented by Jacob Wong. Co-developed with Thomas Campbell. Thirteen issued patents. Two pending. A technology platform protecting the physics, the geometry, the signal processing, and the architecture of every product DS Scan will bring to market. Sixty years of optical science. Thirty years of waiting for the lasers. One breakthrough that changes how 133 million Americans understand their own blood sugar — without a single drop of blood.
2026 — DS Scan, Inc. and the Future
Deciding not to confuse the world anymore, we changed our name to DS Scan, Inc. — representative of our heritage of Differential Spectroscopy.
The transmissive geometry of SugarScan is the proving ground — clinical accuracy established in the hand web, the most optically accessible site on the human body. That foundation opens the door to reflective sensing: the SugarPatch, worn anywhere on the body. Reflective sensing is what the world is waiting for. We are building toward it the right way — earning the clinical data first.
By now, you might be sizing DS Scan up against some major players. The wrist is wrong. Bone and tendon defeat transmissive sensing. Reflective sensing at the wrist faces a signal-to-noise problem that has remained unsolved — despite the biggest technology houses trying: Apple, Samsung, Huawei. Avoiding the wrist entirely, we chose transmissive geometry at the hand web — accessible tissue with no hair, no pulsing arteries, just a clean optical path where the physics actually works.
DILAST was built to measure glucose. But the physics does not stop there. The following analytes each present absorption peaks with high potential for DILAST detection:
HbA1c Lipids Glycated proteins Water Troponin I Sepsis markers Ethanol THCEach represents a future product line. Each is enabled by the same patented optical platform. The glucose molecule is our focus. Then we expand on what DILAST can see.