World Diabetes Day

In anticipation of the forthcoming World Diabetes I was asked for some thoughts about diabetes for the people at Timesulin (http://timesulin.com/blog/). 

Endocrinologist Professor David Kerr was one of the first supporters of Timesulin, particularly because of his passion for smart technologies to help make life for people with diabetes easier. Professor Kerr and his endocrinology team have launched the fabulous www.VoyageMD.com, which provides very relevant advice for those of us who have to travel and maintain good diabetes control. Thank you for taking the time to share your love of shiny things with us, David! You can follow Professor Kerr on Twitter by clicking here.

I don’t have diabetes but I come across many thousands of people who do and who have to live with it every day of their life. Living with diabetes is certainly not easy especially the day-to-day juggling of insulin and I can completely understand how difficult it is to nail the HBA1c to the target range but at the same time avoiding the beast that is hypoglycaemia.

I do like shiny thing things and on World Diabetes Day I want to make sure that the scientists, engineers, boffins and money men understand that technology has an enormous potential to help the millions of people with diabetes. However, when they are thinking about new ventures and new designs they need to talk to their customers at an early stage to make sure what they create is of value to both people living with diabetes and healthcare professionals like myself.

I also need to make sure my colleagues working in health understand that diabetes – especially Type 1 diabetes – is for life and it is not easy. I did think of using the tag line “life is made up of moments” but that has recently been high-jacked by a major brewery!! Nevertheless it hasn’t stopped me thinking about how we can help to reduce the burden of diabetes by using future technologies.

The concept is simple – create a library of “Diabetes Moments” where anyone can take one of these moments and find practical information of how to make their life easier from a diabetes perspective. The first one is already available for people with diabetes who need to travel (www.VoyageMD.com) and we are about to launch our first app specifically for people with painful neuropathy caused by diabetes. We are also working on using the experience from the computer gaming world to look at making monitoring easier and more understandable. Future ideas will be around pregnancy planning, driving, hypoglycaemia detection etc.

Diabetes sucks – but that should not stop us from thinking laterally and creating new technologies to help, We also need to keep hearing from the people that matter – those living with diabetes. On World Diabetes Day I would like everyone with diabetes to look at what they do everyday and come up with one idea that could and would make a difference. A great example is the Timesulin device – simple idea fulfilling a real need – I wish I had thought of it!!