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Managing Diabetes In “Real Time”

The cost of managing chronic diseases is the largest portion of healthcare expenditures in developed countries. For example, the prevalence of adult acquired diabetes has been rising in the United States, in concert with increasing rates obesity. The CDC has termed it an “epidemic,” especially in light of the massive costs incurred by the healthcare system due to diabetes.

The deleterious health effects of many chronic conditions can be diminished by behavior modifications. While few would underestimate the difficulty of having patients lose weight or exercise more, good management of blood sugar in diabetes is both objectively measurable and strongly correlated with reduced end-organ damage.

This is among the reasons why Research2Guidance has recently nominated diabetes as the condition most likely to be most targeted by mobile medical software and devices (mHealth). This finding is part of their recently published Global Mobile Health Market Report 2010-2015. This is the same report that also predicted that, in the future, medical apps are likely to be distributed by physicians and healthcare institutions.

This time Research2Guidance is highlighting the portion of the survey where they looked into where mobile devices have the most potential to affect health outcomes. While other chronic conditions such as hypertension and obesity have larger populations, the market researchers felt diabetes had the largest market potential due to the huge cost saving potential, the demographic and geographic overlap between smartphone users and people with diabetes, and the real potential to improve blood sugar management using mobile devices. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Why Are iPods Cooler Than Glucose Monitors?

dbmine-design-challenge-2009-small-iconThat’s the $10,000 question. My friend and fellow health blogger, Amy Tenderich is hosting a design contest to encourage “coolness” to flow the way of diabetes-related technology. Now that’s a good cause! Here’s the 411 from Amy:

About 21 million Americans live with diabetes, yet the devices we rely on generally don’t hold a candle to the sleek design of consumer electronics (think iPod)… So patients are going “grassroots” to improve the design of tools for treating diabetes:

On Monday morning, we’ll be announcing opening of the 2009 DiabetesMine Design Challenge, a San Francisco blog-based competition calling for innovative design concepts (devices or web applications) that will improve life with diabetes.

This year, the contest is sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), with a Grand Prize of $10,000.  It’s also supported by global innovation firm IDEO and by Medgadget.com, the Internet journal of emerging medical technologies.

The competition is open to ANYONE with a good idea: patients, parents, startup companies, design & medical students, developers, engineers, etc.

The contest is hosted at www.diabetesmine.com/designcontest

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