WHY WE DO IT

Diabetes is a data-intensive condition, but diabetes decisions aren’t as data-driven as they could be. Everyone on the D.I.A.L. team knows this through our personal connections to diabetes.

With so much focus on the hardware aspects of diabetes technology, the importance of data can be lost in the shuffle. We think that data are fertile grounds for innovating solutions to improve quality of life with diabetes.

People with diabetes can develop a special kind of wizardry in translating their data into action, based on the information at hand and their knowledge of the personal aspects of their diabetes. Part math, part intuition, part trial-and-error, part luck – these factors and many others make up the tricky diabetes equations that people with diabetes have to solve multiple times every day (and night).

We think science, engineering, and medicine can do more for people with diabetes, starting with making sense of the data at the level of the individual. Data are used to pick stocks, forecast the weather, and predict elections. Why not launch a multidisciplinary public collaboration to pursue new avenues of diabetes research and to enable truly data-driven diabetes management?

DIAL’s goals are:

  • • to be open minded about the diversity of data that matter in diabetes
  • • to systematically wring all available information out of every bit and byte in the diabetes data ecosystem
  • • to build a public knowledge base of how diabetes works in the individual
  • • to enable data-driven action for each person with diabetes and the devices and apps they choose to employ