IBM and Roche are collaborating with the challenges faced by millions of people around the world: the relentless grind of diabetes management. Their new creator, Accu-Chek SmartGuide Predict App, offers users AI-powered glucose prediction capabilities.
This app not only tracks where your glucose levels are, but also shows where you are heading. Imagine the weather forecast. It’s essentially something that IBM and Roche create.
AI-driven diabetes management
The app works alongside Roche’s continuous glucose monitoring sensors, crunching numbers in real time, providing predictive insights that help users stay ahead of potentially dangerous blood glucose variability.
What caught my eye was the three outstanding features that addressed very specific concerns. The “Glucose Prediction” function visualizes where glucose is heading over the next two hours. This gives it an important window to make adjustments before things go south.
In people living with hypoglycemia anxiety (when blood glucose levels plummet to dangerous levels), the “low glucose prediction” feature works like an early warning system, flagging potential drops up to 30 minutes before they occur. That’s enough time to take corrective action.
Perhaps the most encouraging is the “Night Low Prediction” feature, which estimates the risk of overnight hypoglycemia. This is the most frightening outlook for diabetics. Before you push into the night, the AI-powered diabetes management app offers heads-ups on whether or not you need that bedtime snack. This feature should provide a sense of security for countless households.
“By leveraging the power of AI-enabled prediction technology, Roche’s Accu-Chek SmartGuide Predict APP will help people with diabetes take proactive measures to manage their illness.”
How AI is accelerating diabetes research
It’s not just patients who benefit from this partnership. The company has developed rather clever research tools using IBM’s Watsonx AI platform to transform the way clinical research data is analysing.
Anyone involved in clinical research knows the heart-breaking boredom of manual data analysis. IBM and Roche tools coordinate, translate, and classify all anonymized clinical data and provide a heavy lifting by connecting dots between glucose monitoring data and participants’ daily activities.
result? Researchers can find meaningful patterns and correlations at some of the usual time. This behind-the-scenes innovation may do more to advance diabetes care and management in the long term than the app itself.
What makes this collaboration particularly interesting is the way it brings together two different worlds. IBM’s computing power and AI know-how combine it with Roche’s decades of healthcare and diabetes expertise.
“The long-standing partnership with IBM highlights the potential for cross-industry innovation in addressing unmet medical needs and bringing significant advances to patients,” says Hartmann.
“The use of cutting-edge technologies such as AI and machine learning can accelerate time to the market and improve treatment outcomes at the same time.”
Christian Keller, general manager of IBM Switzerland, added: “The collaboration with Roche highlights the possibilities of AI when implemented with a clear goal of supporting patients in diabetes management.
“Our technology and consulting expertise allows us to provide a reliable, customized, and secure technical environment that is essential to enabling healthcare innovation.”
What does this mean for the future of healthcare technology?
Over the years I’ve covered healthcare technology, and I’ve seen many promising innovations go on a whim. However, we feel that this IBM-Roche partnership is promising. Perhaps because AI’s thoughtfully targeted applications address these specific, well-defined issues.
Across the world, where an estimated 590 million people (or 1 in 9 in the adult population) live with diabetes, the transition from reactivity to predictive management can be game-changing. It’s not about replacing human judgment, it’s about reinforcing it with timely, practical insights.
This app is currently only available in Switzerland. This seems like a sensible approach. Perfect before testing, refinement and wide deployment. Healthcare professionals will monitor this Swiss deployment to see if it fulfills its promise.
If successful, this collaboration could serve as a blueprint for how the tech giant and pharmaceutical companies work together on other chronic diseases. Imagine a similar predictive approach to heart disease, asthma, or Parkinson’s disease.
For now, however, we are focusing on using AI to improve diabetes management and helping people sleep a little easier at night. And honestly, it’s a well-worthy goal in its own right.
(Photo: Alexander Gray)
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