Experts focus on using injection data to help young people with type 1 diabetes

Diabetes researchers are coming together to help young people with type 1 diabetes “better optimise” their treatment.
Teams from Harvard University, Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Israel and a digital health company called DreaMed Diabetes have pledged to improve therapy options for those who rely on daily insulin injections and measuring their own blood sugar levels.
Together, all those involved want to develop “automated algorithms for insulin management”, according to Dr Eyal Dassau, who is a senior research fellow in biomedical engineering at Harvard’s John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and is also the principal study investigator.
Dassau explained that the aim is to develop a novel dosing support system for patients on multiple daily injections, who rely on personalized data such as past glucose and insulin levels, meal times, amounts eaten and physical activity.
Eran Atlas, the chief executive officer (CEO) of DreaMed Diabetes, said: “A large fraction of people with type 1 diabetes do not use an insulin pump and a continuous glucose monitor for various reasons, but rather rely on glucometers and insulin injections. Currently, there is no available data on the insulin injection habits of this type 1 population.”
Atlas believes there is an opportunity to collect data on these patients and develop a product that will help them better control their type 1 diabetes using ‘smart’ connected devices.
These devices will enables insulin injections to be registered on a patient’s smartphone, with data collected in cloud-based platforms.
Professor Moshe Phillip, who is director of the hospital’s Institute for Endocrinology and Diabetes, said people who do not use insulin pumps and manually record all their personal data can have more issues in maintaining good glucose control.
He said: “Therefore, there is a need to develop additional tools and algorithms to assist both physicians and patients to better optimise patient’s treatment profile in order to improve glucose control outcomes in the type 1 diabetes population.”