Signature - Q2, 2008 - (Page 34)

Bluetooth Technology @ Work | Q2 ’08 A key pilot project in the area of wireless diabetes monitoring was conducted by the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine in Tromsø, Norway. This international research and development center gathers, produces and provides information about telemedicine and e-health, including diabetes-related technology. Its partner in this important mission was Malmö, Sweden–based connectBlue, a provider of wireless solutions for industrial and commercial applications. The project was ﬁnanced by the Norwegian Directorate for Health and Social Welfare. Bluetooth wireless technology is not exactly a newcomer to medical applications. The technology is fast becoming a regular feature in home health care devices as well as in the operating room, including endoscopy equipment, deﬁbrillator monitors, portable pulse monitors and hearing aids. A wireless patient-operated application for glucose meters is a logical step in the industry’s technological evolution. “I think this proves once again that Bluetooth has tremendous potential in telemedicine and sports,” says Rolf Nilsson, president and founder of connectBlue. “Anywhere you have a human being moving around and the need to measure something, Bluetooth can simplify it.” For the Children Phase one of the Norwegian Centre’s project with connectBlue began in 2001 and included 15 children with diabetes from northern Norway between the ages of 10 and 16. They are pretty much like any other children who are navigating adolescence – except that they are among the estimated 200,000 children worldwide who suffer from type 1 diabetes, a childhood-onset form of the disease that has seen a threefold increase in cases over the last 30 years. The centerpiece of the four-month-long project was connectBlue’s Bluetooth enabled serial port adapter, which replaced an RS232 cable between a typical blood glucose meter and a mobile phone. The phone runs an application that retrieves the glucose data via the Bluetooth wireless connection and changes it into a text message, which is then automatically sent as an SMS over the phone’s network to the child’s parents and/or physician. “The patients were very eager for the system. But the nice thing was they didn’t have to put extra effort into it,” recalls Eirik Årsand, project manager at the Norwegian Centre. “They took blood glucose levels the same way they did before. All they needed was their phone. I think it had a greater impact on the parents than the children.” Looking at the project from a technical perspective, connectBlue’s Nilsson says it was a relatively easy process. “This was the ﬁrst time we had done anything with telemedicine. So before we began, there was some discussion about functionality and what the adapters were capable of doing. But in the end, it was based on one of our regular products and no modiﬁcations were involved. They were able to handle everything with our standard conﬁgurations.” The goal for everyone involved was to be able to use normal mobile phones to transmit the data. A proprietary software application was developed and run on the patient’s mobile phone. The project team reconﬁgured and built an adapter based on the connectBlue Bluetooth enabled module to interface with a standard blood glucose monitor (OneTouch Ultra, from LifeScan). From there, it was simple for the phone and the meter to communicate via Bluetooth technology. “There were some technical problems, but overall the test was highly successful,” says Årsand. “The biggest challenge may be changing the mindset of those in the health care system – demonstrating the viability of Bluetooth for a whole range of health issues and showing them that there is a better way to do things by incorporating it into their programs.” It’s Simply Better FAST FACTS | Diabetes by the Numbers | WHO 180 million / number of people with diabetes worldwide 100 / percentage increase in diagnosis expected by 2030 90 / percentage of patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which is related to obesity and lack of exercise 12 / percentage of people with diabetes who have limited or no vision as a result of the disease 10-20 / percentage of diabetic deaths related to kidney failure Source: World Health Organization Diabetes Fact Sheet, who.int Årsand’s passion for the project has a lot to do with his own experience. “I have diabetes, and when I started working at the Centre in 2000, I thought it would be nice if someone could make data transmission better than it had been. Self-care was the place to start,” he explains. This meant investigating the experiences of those who do their own diabetes testing and ﬁnding ways to improve the process – particularly among vulnerable patient groups like children and the elderly. The regular monitoring of blood glucose levels can be daunting for children as well as their parents, who often have to supervise the procedure or make sure the results are properly recorded and within the proper value range. Quite simply, the Centre’s goal was to make everyday life easier for all those affected by diabetes, by simplifying and automating the process and letting the parents assist their children at a distance. “It’s about making critical data available to people that need it,” Årsand says. “Children can do the testing at school or other places. The problem is that they may not have the right cognitive ability to decide what to do with the results. That’s why we wanted to ﬁnd a way to automatically transfer data to the parents. And while it hasn’t been implemented yet, we also demonstrated that it is possible to transfer blood glucose data directly into the person’s electronic health records at hospitals.” Since blood glucose levels are taken on average about ﬁve times a day, patients usually carry around a measurement pouch or purse, which includes sensors, test strips and lancets. “We simply added the (wireless) adapter so they can take the blood tests wherever they are,” Årsand explains. The adapter’s small size makes it easy to integrate with the rest of the user’s metering equipment. 34 | SIGnature | Bluetooth.org http://who.int http://www.bluetooth.org

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