Single-channel Electrooculogram (EOG) is proposed for detecting diabetic retinopathy. The Corneal-retinal potential of the eyes plays a vital role in the acquisition of Electrooculography. Diabetes is the most prevalent disease and for one out of three people with diabetes above 40 years, diabetic retinopathy occurs. It is necessary for the early detection of diabetic retinopathy as it is one of the primary reasons for blindness in the population. The potential difference between cornea and retina leads to the acquisition of EOG signal. The proposed study aims to design a low-cost miniaturized hardware circuit to obtain EOG signal using second order filters without compromising in accuracy of the outcome signal and to classify the signal into normal and diabetic retinopathy subjects by extracting the statistical features like kurtosis, mean, median absolute deviation, standard deviation, and range from software filtered EOG signal. Among the classifiers used, Support vector machine (SVM) shows a higher accuracy of 93.33%. The sensitivity, specificity and Area Under Curve (AUC) values of SVM are 96.43%, 90.625%, 0.93% is considered as more favorable outcome for the proposed method and it supports the developed prototype and processing methodology. The novelty of the research is based on proposing and exploring a non-invasive methodology for Diabetic retinopathy diagnosis based on EOG signal. Thus, the designed hardware is simple in operation and cost effective, provides an affordable and non-invasive diagnostic tool for diabetic retinopathy patients.