Meet DidaPOSC – A team which innovated technical implementation of diabetes data sharing and interoperability. Learn more from this interview with Mikael Rinnetmaki.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team?
I’m Mikael and I founded Sensotrend to help make life with diabetes easier through clever apps, both for myself and for others. Now we’re 8 people in total, and most people in the team live with diabetes personally or have a family member with diabetes.
What is your motivation to work in the data portability field?
Type 1 diabetes is a data-driven condition. To treat myself well, I need to understand how different types of meals affect my glucose levels, what’s the effect of different types of exercise, etc. For this I need to pull together data from many different sources, like my continuous glucose monitor, my insulin pump and from the many apps and gadgets I use to track my exercise, nutrition, and sleep.
The open-source development community Nightscout has produced dozens of apps to help with various challenges in living with diabetes. Nowadays it is even possible for me to automate certain aspects of my insulin delivery. But this is only possible if I as a patient have a continuous, real-time access to the data from my medical devices.
Today these things are only possible for hackers. They should be an everyday right for anyone living with diabetes.
In simple words, what challenges does your project address?
Currently many medical devices already upload their data to the device manufacturer’s cloud service. However, it is not possible for me as a patient wearing that device to use the data in apps that I find useful. Through our project we aim to make it easier for device manufacturers to publish the data in a harmonized content format and to build use cases that demonstrate the benefits of doing so.
What solution are you developing?
In our DAPSI project we’re publishing some of the components we’ve developed for Sensotrend’s services as open source. We are also developing new components, again as open source. We hope the components will be useful both for developers in the diabetes data community and for larger data sharing ecosystems.
What are the next steps?
We’re really hoping to see a citizen-centric ecosystem for sharing health data emerge. We’re now driving this in both the MyData community and the Gaia-X network, and are following the activities around the European Health Data Space.