Intelligent Diabetes Assistant

We believe that machine learning can be used to help diabetics and care providers manage diabetes by predicting the effect that behaviors have on blood glucose. This when coupled with telemedicine could help care providers give better individualized therapy more frequently to patients. Currently, diabetics might get 15 minutes of interaction with a health expert during a checkup, and in that amount of time the physician must quickly evaluate the patient?#146;s health to offer therapy advice. The Intelligent Diabetes Assistant (IDA) addresses this problem by remotely collecting data, instantaneously sharing that data with a physician, and automatically processing the data to reveal important patterns. The system makes data collection more efficient for the patient, and it will make data analysis more efficient for the care team. The goal of this research project is to create an intelligent assistant to help patients and clinicians work together to manage diabetes at a personal and social level.

Diabetes Mellitus is a chronic condition afflicting 246 million people worldwide where the patient’s body does not properly control the amount of blood glucose. In the United States there are approximately 20 million diabetics which is an incidence rate of approximately 6%. In Qatar, where this research takes place, the incidence rate is approximately 15%. In the US the disease and its related complications are the 6th leading cause of death, but with proper management the risks of complications can be substantially reduced.