I'm Mikael from Sensotrend. We've launched an Automated Diabetes Diary.
I'm a Type 1 diabetic myself. My body no longer produces the insulin hormone, rather I must inject it myself using an external device. If my body does not get insulin, I'll be in a coma in 24 hours, and dead soon after that. So I make sure I'll always have insulin available.
Then I have the problem of knowing how much insulin to inject in any given situation. Hormones generally work together, and if you're only controlling one of them, it's really tricky. No two bodies are the same, no two life situations are the same. Diabetes treatment is highly individual, and all people with diabetes must constantly track themselves, and learn from the data they gather.
There are now over 370 million people with diabetes in the world, and the yearly treatment costs are almost half a trillion dollars. And the numbers are just growing (up-to-date information will be published on the World Diabetes Day).
Back to tracking and learning. Traditionally, all the tracking has been done with a logbook. Nowadays there are also smartphone applications available. I need to log my blood glucose measurements, estimated amount of carbohydrates in everything I eat and drink, physical activity or lack of it, and the insulin dosages I have used. The problem for me is the amount of work it requires to keep such a diary.
You know, most of that data already exists somewhere, or can be tracked really easily. The diabetes devices produce rich logs, a pedometer app on my smartphone tracks my activity automatically on the background. I can choose a meal logger app to just snap a picture of what I'm eating.
The point is that I want to use the best tools available for tracking all this information, and not transfer it from place to place manually.
That's how we manage tracking. How about learning?
What's been missing so far has been a way to get all this information together, in a way that's meaningful for people with diabetes and their healthcare professionals.
This is what we do.
There's an emerging market of Patient-Centric Health Information Exchanges like Taltioni and Microsoft HealthVault. They are systems parallel to the Electronic Health Records you find in hospitals. Patient-Centric Health Information Exchanges are focused on preventive care and after care, where patients perform the measurements and are more in charge of their own treatment.
We integrate data from all the apps and devices to these Health Information Exchanges.
Once we have all the data in these central locations, we visualize it to diabetics and their healthcare professionals. They can analyze how certain kind of activity or meal affects blood glucose levels or weight.
We want the healthcare organizations to learn from this data as well.
They can use it to rationalize use of resources. For instance, instead of a fixed quota of glucose test strips per patient, they can provide just the amount of strips that person is using. This eliminates waste. With more data they can also see which kind of treatment and support each individual diabetic requires.
In the future, we want to use Big Data Analytics to mine this data. If a group of people with diabetes are doing really well compared to another group with similar parameters, we can see what these well performing ones are doing right and what the others may learn from them.
We'll be presenting our automated diabetes diary on a stand in the Health Demo Area of the Slush conference.
There you can meet the team. We're currently two type 1 diabetics that know diabetes and software really well, and a PR and marketing person.
We're looking to add some financial expertise to our core team, by the way, so please spread the word. And we're also looking for financing.
The thing I want to leave the audience with on the World Diabetes Day, is that everyone signing up at signup.sensotrend.com on November 14 will get 6 months free use of our application when we launch in their market. That will be early next year in Finland, and internationally later next year.
And for you, our dear blog readers, the offer is valid starting from now! The web page is already live, so go for it. And if you know any people with diabetes who might be interested, please spread the word! Please also forward the message to all healthcare professionals, financial experts, and investors you think might be interested in cooperating with us.
Thanks for reading! And as always, feedback is warmly welcomed. It's now even easier to leave the comment below, no account or registration is required. We're looking forward to hearing from you.
No comments:
Post a Comment