Managing diabetes in the digital age

Abstract

The prevalence of diabetes is rising globally. Poor glucose control results in higher rates of diabetes-related complications and an increase in health care expenditure. Diabetes self-management education (DSME) training has shown to improve glucose control, and thus may reduce long-term complications. Implementation of diabetes self-management education programs may not be feasible for all the institutions or in developing countries due to lack of resources and higher costs associated with DSME training. With the increasing use of smartphones and Internet, there is an opportunity to use digital tools for training people with diabetes to self-manage their disease. A number of mobile applications, Internet portal, and websites are available to help patients to improve their diabetes care. However, the studies are limited to show its effectiveness and cost-benefits in diabetes self-management. In addition, there are many challenges ahead for the digital health industry. In this review, we assess the use of newer technologies and digital health in diabetes self-management with a focus on future directions and potential challenges.

A Survey on Trend, Opportunities and Challenges of mHealth Apps

“…Current mHealth apps can be categorised in terms of individual prevention disease [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], personal health safety [24], improving health [25,], improving well-being [26][27][28][29], and giving advice on response to treatment [30]. Evidently, many of available mHealths apps on the market are not grounded in theory.…”

“…Several studies have reported on the effectiveness of diabetes self-management [14,15,35]. The diabetes management app is considered effective if it is able to remind diabetes patients to take medications at appropriate times [15] .The success of the app for adults with type 2 diabetes had been reported in [35].…”

“…Thus, mHealth technology is an alternative for cost effective health support. The review of this study also discover that mHealth researchers and publishers have focused more on individual prevention diseases (Table 1) such as selfmanagement for diabetes [14,15], gout [16], chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [17], bipolar disorders [18] and bowel disease [19], stroke [20,21] heart disease [22] and flu [23]. Article [23] presented HHeal, an app which integrates flu risk information and flu preventive behaviors, which provide a personal flu risk bar that arises when a user is near someone with flu-like symptoms and drops when the user finishes one of the suggested flu-preventive behaviors.…”

The Future of Continuous Glucose Monitoring

“…The mobile devices may have applications (Apps) for guiding patients on insulin dose. 25,26 We feel the future is bright for people with diabetes. We want to sincerely thank Dexcom for sponsoring this supplement, and we hope you all find this supplement useful for your clinical practice.…”

Diabetesesek dietoterápiájának és önmenedzselésének támogatása mobilapplikációk használatával

“…A jelenlegi mobilalkalmazások több funkcióval rendelkeznek: lehetőséget kínálnak a fiziológiás paraméterek (testtömeg, vércukor, vérnyomás), a gyógyszerelés, illetve az alkalmazott inzulindózisok, az étrend naplózására és értékelésére [9]. A mobileszközök használata segítsé-get nyújthat a helyes életmód elsajátításában azáltal, hogy a mobileszközök velünk vannak mindennapi éle-tünkben, szituációinkban, a rögzítés helyszínén számít-ják az egyes ételek, illetve étkezések tápanyagtartalmát, ezekről azonnali visszajelzést adnak.…”