iDiabetes

New digital tools for remote, non-invasive and continuous diagnosis for chronic diabetic patients

Challenge

Diabetes is the epidemic of this decade. Type 2 patients are estimated to affect 8.5% of the population, with a clear annual growth. Blood is currently considered the reference biofluid, but blood sampling is an invasive technique incompatible with the needs of diabetic patients.

Digital medicine together with artificial intelligence (AI) shows great potential for personalized management and treatment of chronic diabetic patients. iDiabetes seeks to develop new methods for diagnosis using sweat and saliva sensors.

Solution

iDiabetes’ ambition is to introduce new innovations at the component and system integration level which will make it easier to offer diabetes diagnosis and prognosis. There are three areas of innovation which will help iDiabetes achieve their objective:

Comfortable and safe to use: The main innovation of the project is a smart band-aid with disposable Sensor Module (SM) The device will provide comfort to the user, durability, and mechanical stability, while maintaining all the functional and operational features previously defined. The patch will be based on medical-grade adhesives and include additional conformity. A novel microfluidic system for sweat collection, securing appropriate volume and sample treatment for biosensing (i.e. glucose). The sample preparation for each sensing step will be done in a state-of-the-art disposable microfluidic system, including microcapillary pumps, reagents and electrochemical sensors. The SM will be miniaturized to reduce the issues related to environmental impact that are intrinsic in a disposable device for biomedical analysis.

Easy to use: The band-aid will enable remote monitoring by communication to smart mobile devices that will allow patients to record their own health parameters and send them via standard network infrastructures to be stored on a cloud-based platform. This includes low power electronics for sensor readout, data management and communication to the smartphone (via BLE, or plug-in) The same tool would facilitate remote consultation, both synchronous and asynchronous, between patients and usual care-providers.

Sustainable measurement tool: The additional information about the patient condition will be provided by non-invasive glucose measuring in saliva sample. A green glucometer is aimed at progressing in the field of diabetes with the development of a new single-use, non-invasive, green, minimalistic device.

Sigma Cognition’s role in this project is the development of cloud-based data management and deep learning to improve the control towards the personalized treatment of chronic diabetic patients.

Results

The execution phase of iDiabetes began at the end of 2022 and is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2025. The project is currently in the definition and identification of requirements stage.

As part of the iDIABETES project, several public databases on diabetes patients were analyzed and made available as part of Sigma AI’s “Open Datasets.”

Funding

The project is supported by the EU Next Generation funds through the State Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) and is part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.