JMIR Diabetes
Emerging technologies, medical devices, apps, sensors, and informatics to help people with diabetes
Editor-in-Chief: Caroline R. Richardson, MD, Department of Family Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School, USA
Recent Articles



Diabetes is one of the leading noncommunicable chronic diseases globally. In people with diabetes, blood glucose levels need to be monitored regularly and managed adequately through healthy lifestyles and medications. However, various factors contribute to poor medication adherence. Smartphone apps can improve medication adherence in people with diabetes, but it is not clear which app features are most beneficial.

Over 34 million people in the United States have diabetes, with 1.5 million diagnosed every year. Diabetes self-management education and support (DSMES) is a crucial component of treatment to delay or prevent complications. Rural communities face many unique challenges in accessing DSMES, including geographic barriers and availability of DSMES programs that are culturally adapted to rural context.

The use of continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) is recommended as the standard of care by the American Diabetes Association for individuals with type 1 diabetes (T1D). Few hardware-agnostic, open-source, whole-population tools are available to facilitate the use of CGM data by clinicians such as physicians and certified diabetes educators.

Safety-net emergency departments often serve as the primary entry point for medical care for low income predominantly minority patient populations. Herein, we sought to provide insight into the feasibility, technological proficiencies, engagement characteristics, and practical considerations for a mHealth intervention at a safety-net emergency department.

The Diabetes Questionnaire is a digital patient-reported outcome and experience measure for adults living with diabetes. The Diabetes Questionnaire is intended for use in routine clinical visits in diabetes care and to enable patient perspectives to be integrated into the Swedish National Diabetes Register. The Diabetes Questionnaire was developed on the basis of patients’ perspectives, and evidence for its measurement qualities has been demonstrated. Patients receive an invitation to complete the questionnaire before clinical visits, and the patient and health care professional (HCP) can discuss the findings, which are instantly displayed during the visit. Implementation processes for new tools in routine care need to be studied to understand the influence of contextual factors, the support needed, and how patients and HCPs experience clinical use.

The use of digital technology to assess patients remotely can reduce clinical study costs. In the European Union, the 2D matrix code on prescription drug packaging serves as a unique identifier of a given package of medication, and thus, also of the patient receiving that medication. Scanning of the 2D matrix code may therefore allow remote patient authentication in clinical studies.

This study was performed to assess the system accuracy of the blood glucose monitoring system SD GlucoNavii Mentor (SD Biosensor Inc, Korea). The study procedures were based on International Organization for Standardization 15197:2013, in that capillary blood samples from 100 participants’ fingertips were measured with three reagent system lots of the self-monitoring blood glucose system. Samples were collected for comparison measurements on a hexokinase-based glucose analyzer (Cobas Integra400 Plus, Roche Instrument Center, Switzerland). Glucose concentrations were distributed as required by International Organization for Standardization 15197. For each of the 100 evaluable samples, duplicate measurements were taken from three different reagent lots, for a total of 600 measurements. Overall, 98.3% (590/600) of individual measurement results (185/186, 99.5% for glucose values <100 mg/dl and 405/414, 97.8% for glucose values ≥100 mg/dl) were within ±15 mg/dl or ±15% of the corresponding comparison method results. All results (100%) fell into the consensus error grid zones A and B, indicating only clinically acceptable results. In conclusion, the blood glucose monitoring system SD GlucoNavii Mentor device fulfilled the system accuracy criteria of the International Organization for Standardization 15197, indicating measurement accuracy sufficient for diabetes therapy.

Lockdown restrictions reduce COVID-19 community transmission; however, they may pose challenges for noncommunicable disease management. A 112-day hard lockdown in Victoria, Australia (commencing March 23, 2020) coincided with an intervention trial of reducing and breaking up sitting time in desk workers with type 2 diabetes who were using a provided consumer-grade activity tracker (Fitbit).

Accurately identifying patients with hypoglycemia is key to preventing adverse events and mortality. Natural language processing (NLP), a form of artificial intelligence, uses computational algorithms to extract information from text data. NLP is a scalable, efficient, and quick method to extract hypoglycemia-related information when using electronic health record data sources from a large population.