Hope and hype: Inside the push for wearable diabetes technology

April 2, 2018|Internal Medicine

Wearable diabetes tech targets more than glucose

There’s more to wearable, noninvasive diabetes technology than glucose-monitoring. One of the new frontiers is diagnostics.

Earlier this year, researchers from the University of California at San Francisco and the digital startup Cardiogram reported that they were able to use data from digital heart rate sensors (like those found in Apple Watches, Fitbits and other devices) to correctly detect diabetes in patients.

In a study presented at the 2018 meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the researchers said they detected diabetes in 85% of 462 participants (out of a pool of 14,011) who’d previously been diagnosed with the condition (AAAAI abstract arXiv:1802.02511v1 [cs.LG]).

Heart rates can offer insight into diabetes because “your pancreas is linked to your heart through both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system,” said Cardiogram cofounder Brandon Ballinger in an interview. He pointed to a 2005 study that linked cardiac autonomic impairment to the development of diabetes. (Diabetes Care 2005 Mar; 28[3]: 668-74)

The next step is to test whether the data analysis can detect undiagnosed diabetes, Mr. Ballinger said.