Smart Diabetes Management

Practical example and current challenges

• Diabetes is defined as a disease where the body is unable to produce or effectively react to insulin, which results in abnormal levels of blood glucose. Thus, type 1 diabetes patients need to monitor their blood glucose and must make hundreds of decisions regarding how to treat their condition every day. This makes the manual diabetes management highly prone to human errors.
• In order to be able to create a large-scale, digitalized, accessible and semi-autonomous system to treat diabetes, regulatory and technical challenges need to be considered. As health data are very sensitive, data sovereignty and data protection need to be ensured and the data must be protected against cybersecurity risks. At the same time, diabetic patients must have full control over their data. The technical challenge is to build a system which makes the huge amount of data accessible for research centers, medical devices producers, patients and healthcare providers.
• To unlock the huge potential of a Smart Diabetes Management, not only Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM) and insulin pumps must be interfaced. Additional end devices like smart watches or heart rate variability monitors also need to be enabled to access and share data.

What added value does the "GAIA-X project" offer?

• GAIA-X offers an infrastructure to interface medical devices used to treat diabetes and automize the blood sugar management of diabetic patients. This will lower the Hemoglobin A1C and leads to an extension of the patients’ life.
• GAIA-X enables a secure ecosystem where CGM and insulin pumps can be integrated, and algorithms will manage the administration of insulin on behalf of the patient. CGMs can also be connected to additional smart wearables, such as heart rate variability monitors, which will result in the creation of innovative datasets that can help better understand the implications of the illness.
• GAIA-X gives valuable insights to physicians about the data collected and hereby supports a more efficient and effective method in treating patients. Thus, the public budget can be managed more efficiently.
• Research institutions and universities will explore new fields and science will progress. Medical device manufacturers can use the scientific progress to enter new markets. New software startups can also emerge by leveraging Big Data on diabetes.

Use Case Team

• Christian Pisetta – ESMT Berlin and Yale School of Management