A new personal health monitoring
system promises improved management of diabetes, a condition affecting 1 in 10
adults in the UK.
Real-time blood sugar
measurements are recorded via a sensor and mobile phone app using
"cloud" internet technology.
The system is being trialled by
diabetic athletes, cycling 2100 km over a fortnight across Europe.
Instant blood sugar monitoring
could also stop marathon runners and long-distance cyclists "hitting the
wall".
Diabetes is on the rise in the
UK. One in 10 people in hospital have diabetes, with a similar proportion of
deaths attributable to the disease. It is a chronic disease with no cure, but
it can be managed.
Currently about 10% of the NHS
budget is spent on direct treatment of diabetes, with a further large chunk
taken up tackling serious complications that may include kidney failure, nerve
damage, blindness and amputations.
Diabetes control typically
exploits post-hoc data. Patients might get their blood sugar levels assessed
every six-months, for example, with reports on how well they have been
controlled in the previous months.
Researchers from the Universities
of Newcastle and Northumbria have announced a new approach to diabetes
management, based around a state of the art personal health monitoring system
that uses medical sensors, mobile phones, and cloud computing.
The technology is being trialled
in a sporting event across Europe this week. A small discrete personal blood
sugar sensor is worn by each participant, linked wirelessly to the wearer's mobile
phone.
Continuous monitoring
Around a hundred cyclists
trialling the technology are currently taking part in a stage race from
Brussels to Barcelona, cross the Alps and Pyrenees on the way, and will
complete a 2,100 km course with a cumulative climb of 22,000m.
All the cyclists are wearing a
blood sugar monitor that works as a small wire, picking up chemical changes to
record glucose in the body fluid when stuck just under the wearer's skin. It
costs around £40 and can be worn for up to ten days, sending data wirelessly to
their mobile phone.
Most of the cyclists taking part
have diabetes. Over the 13 days of the event they will wear continuous glucose
monitors. The data collected via their mobile phones is being downloaded to a
"cloud" data repository and can be analysed in real time by the
scientific team back at Newcastle and Northumbria universities.
People with Type 1 diabetes often
avoid strenuous exercise for fear of experiencing very low blood sugar and
black outs. The technology described offers a route to avoiding such hypoglycemic
episodes with real-time warnings.
Professor Mike Trenell at
Newcastle University, who is leading the trial, said: "It is really about
demonstrating how much things most of us carry in our everyday lives, mobile
phones, hold the potential to help living with diabetes.
"We can enable patients to
make real-time context-based decisions to improve their diabetes control. If we
can get people to walk 45 minutes extra every day we get an equivalent cost
saving of £800 per year." When multiplied by the huge number of patients
currently on diabetes-related medication this amounts to massive saving for the
NHS.
For more typical patients, it is
anticipated that this type of continuous real-time monitoring could, in future,
provide relatively cheap route for diabetes patients to monitor their blood
sugar levels and manage their health.
Used by members of the general
population, or those at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, the monitoring
system could offer an early warning health check, and might be used to help
demonstrate the health benefits of modifying life style, providing instant
positive feedback.
For the road-cycling athletes the
data are being combined with heart rates, cycling cadence, speed and climb
rates in a linked dataset. During the current cycling event, participants' data
can even be accessed via the web.
These sorts of personal
performance datasets are becoming increasingly popular among cyclists, runners
and other recreational athletes, with a wide range of web-based applications
available for recording one's achievements (or otherwise).
For more serious professional
endurance athletes it is easy to see how monitoring blood sugar levels during
activities such as marathons or events such as the Tour de France could be
useful.
"Hitting the wall" in
running, or the equivalent "bonking" in cycling occurs when sugar
reserves are depleted and blood sugar drops. By personal monitoring,
participants would be able to maximise their performance by avoiding such sugar
catastrophes.
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