Evidation Health, a San Mateo, CA-based technology and services company, has teamed up with Tidepool, a nonprofit organization which provides free, open source software to make diabetes data more accessible, meaningful, and actionable, to launch a connected device-powered study of nocturnal hypoglycemic events in people with Type 1 diabetes.
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This is a novel research, which includes connected devices – Dexcom continuous glucose monitors, an Emfit sleep monitor, and a WHOOP activity tracker. Researchers will be able to access data about overnight low blood sugar events that previously hasn’t been available. EVidation’s Achievement platform will be used to recruit participants, who will also complete daily brain games, adding another source of data, reports MobiHealthNews.
Christine Lemke, president and cofounder of Evidation Health, said they’re curious about measuring or observing nocturnal hypoglycemia and investigate how these events that might happen overnight effect behavior, heart rates and sleep patterns the next day. “The hypothesis is if people are having these at night, they’re having a miserable next day and perhaps even a miserable couple of days, and it’s just helpful to be able to objectively measure that rather than to have patients walk into their doctor and anecdotally saying that. This is one of those things that’s really difficult to measure unless you’re looking at things on an everyday continual basis,” she told MobiHealth News.
In the partnership, Tidepool will play the role of a courier, collecting data from the patient’s CGM and send it to Evidation. The non-profit’s mission is to make CGM, insulin pump, and glucometer data interoperable so people with diabetes can see all their data in one app.
“They’ve done all the hard work of integrating with all the different CGMs in order to put the data that’s typically been closed on those devices into the patients’ hands,” Lemke said. “Now all the devices are starting to make shifts toward sharing the data back to individuals, but Tidepool really [put] it together and then put that data back into patients’ hands. We’re just really philosophically aligned from that perspective. And they’ve done it in a rigorous way. They’ve built these connectors. They’ve shown the FDA what they’re doing to make sure the data that comes out of their connectors is rigorous and valid and accurate, and so we’ve been impressed with them on a number of levels.”
Lemke said this study will allow them to collect information about both the impact nocturnal effects have on daytime behavior and vice-versa. Hopefully the information will be useful to treating physicians and empowering to patients. It’s a short observation study, so Evidation expects to have data to work with in Q4.
“We’re excited about this because our platform and our partnerships allow us to ask really different questions about human health,” Lemke said. “And this is one example of being able to ask really interesting questions about human health that haven’t really been measured or seen before.”
