Sweetest of All Inventions reveals story behind diabetes device

The device she and more than 1.3 million Australians use every day was invented by Stanley Clark - for her.

And now she has written a book about her father and his legacy. It will be released during Diabetes Week, running July 9-15.

Stan and his wife Audrey migrated to Australia in 1964; Lisa was born in 1967.

An electrical engineer, he was working at Hanimex and living with his family in Sydney's northern beaches when he observed in five-year-old Lisa symptoms of the illness that took the lives of both his parents.

These included a constant thirst; often Lisa would get up in the middle of the night to drink water from the bathroom tap.

Eventually Lisa was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which she says can often be hard to manage, especially when measuring blood-glucose levels.

"That's because with diabetes, urine's kept in your body for some time," Lisa said. "So you might have high sugar at 4am and you might not go to the toilet till 7am. By that time your sugar's either gone higher or lower. So when you actually test, it's not a clear, instant indication."

Until Stan stepped in, blood sugar testing could only be done at hospital using an expensive imported device.

And accessing it meant a lot of travelling.

"I was going backwards and forwards to the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Camperdown, where I would spend a couple of weeks every three to six months just to try and get my sugar levels back to normal," Lisa said.

Early on, Stan was driving home from the city every morning to give little Lisa her needle, because her mother was so nervous. "Mum would get to me and shake. She had to learn how to do it using an orange."

Stan saw that home glucose blood testing would take pressure off parents, children and busy hospitals.

Paediatric endocrinologist Martin Silink agreed. He arranged for Stan to take home a hospital monitor and try it out. It worked well but Stan was sure a smaller, cheaper mobile device could be produced.

He set to work in his home workshop. "We didn't know exactly what he was doing but we knew he doing something because he always whistled while he worked," Lisa said.

It helped that he had previous experience with reflectance technology. Within a week or two, even without dismantling it, he had created a smaller, battery-powered monitor.

"It was tested at Royal Alexandra and it came out with 99-plus per cent accuracy."

Stan's monitor became a phenomenon. Within three months of its release it was being used at home by 30 children in Professor Silink's ward at Camperdown and around the world.

"The hospital gave Dad $6000 to make more and keep making them as required."

Almost overnight, Stan started a business called Australian Bio Transducers - working at first from the family kitchen table. Soon he was making hundreds of units a week for diabetics (type 1 and 2) of all ages.

But he wasn't finished there. "He was aware diabetes often caused bad eyesight. So instead of requiring users to read a meter, he designed it with coloured diodes. He also made a finger pricker for blind diabetics. It was just remarkable what he did."

Trained as a secretary, Lisa said she could see her dad's business was "just going crazy". So she joined him, becoming the face of the firm "because I was the cause of it". Today Lisa is an ambassador for Diabetes Australia, which has endorsed her book.

By this stage the business had moved to a rented factory. Later it moved to purpose-built premises. But it wasn't to last. Fierce competition from overseas drove the company under within 15 years.

Stan died in 2011. But he still stands tall, his daughter says. "No one could ever take away what my dad created. His invention revolutionised diabetes control both then and into the future."

The book includes contributions by world experts in the field. A percentage of its sales will go to Diabetes Australia and the Stan Clark Chair in Diabetes at Sydney University.