Diabetes Blog Week - Day 4 - Changes

Today's topic: changes I want for diabetes.

Great topic, as it gets to the heart of my interest in coming to Aspire Ventures and doing work for Tempo Health.

To be clear, I don't need another diabetes app that allows me to log my stuff, even though we're building one. I don't need another place to put old news, and I really don't need another place to put data that's already been logged someplace else.

What I want and what I need is insight. I need something that can comb through my data and find the trends that will lead me, and others, to better control. While my relationship with my endo is good, giving them spreadsheets of data and watching them scan over it in a short appointment tells me that they need this information, too.

What we're attempting to do at Tempo Health is just that; focusing on turning all of that data into something that informs the patient and their caregiver about what matters inside of that data. From insights, there becomes a short jump to predictive analytics.

For example, if you know my blood sugar tends to run 10% higher on the third day of an infusion set being in, the insights can recommend higher basal rates or changing infusion sets a day sooner.

Or if you can determine my average rate of fall during aerobic exercise, the insights can offer tailored fueling and basal strategies for workouts.

We've been putting our data in a lot of places for a long time. It's time we got something back for it.

Along the way, the product has to provide everything needed so that the data is consistently uploaded into it. Predictive analytics. Artificial intelligence. These are all very real things, but they are fueled by data, so getting the data into the machine is a critical piece of the puzzle.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The gun in my basement.

Image
In my basement, I have a safe. And in that safe, under expired passports and birth certificates, there's a gun. It's unloaded. Hasn't been loaded in probably twenty years, and yet every time I take it out, I check to make sure. If you're a gun nerd, it's a 9 shot .22 revolver. On this website , it says that "it is true that many people have been killed by a .22 LR in the course of history," but the writer concludes that this weapon is a bad choice for self defense. I didn't buy it for self defense. I didn't even buy it. It was my father's and after he died, my mother gave it me, along with an Elgin watch he'd worn for years. The watch was weathered and worn and I took it to be restored. The jeweler refused, saying it was worthless. Two decades later, the watch is still in my jewelry box. There's no need for it to be locked up. I have no idea if this gun is in my possession legally. No idea if my father had a permit for it, or w...
Read more

Happy D-Blog Day, Uh, I Guess...

So according to diabetics blog-wide, today is D-Blog Day, the day when those of us affected by diabetes are supposed to blog about it. Or draw awareness to diabetes... Or something like that. I'm really a bad poster child for the disease. Not because I'm not in great control (actually, I am), but because I've just never been bothered by the disease so much. Red sums it up well in Shawshank Redemption: "Get busy living, or get busy dying." So if living means three blood sugar tests a day, so be it. If living means being hooked up to an insulin pump, go to it. That being said, I feel for anyone with diabetic kids... I'm a tough guy about the disease. I wouldn't be if my kids had it. If either of my kids had diabetes, I'd be screaming about the politicians who are spending money on wars instead of research, and I'd be yelling about the schools that make it difficult to be a diabetic in the classroom. But my kids don't have diabetes, so instead I ...
Read more

The Bright Side

“ And if you ever get scared, look on the bright side: You’ve got a new life.” – Amos Lee Last month, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Since then, I’ve tried to write this essay a few times. The first attempt followed a narrative arc rife with suspense, with a few years of frustrating doctors’ visits, mysterious symptoms that came and went and the all-around sentiment that the batteries that powered my body were no longer able to sustain a charge or be fully refueled at the end of the day. But if you Google Lyme disease, you realize there’s nothing unique about that story. In fact, the reality that my own diagnosis came only two years after all of this started makes this a much shorter story than it is for many. The theme of the second version was more pitiful, tinged with regret about what this had taken from me over the past two years and what it might take in the future. But honestly, that one didn’t get far at all. If there’s a good time for something like ...
Read more