Wireless Supervision of Children with Diabetes

The Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine (NST) in Tromsø is a research and development center that aims to gather, produce and provide knowledge about telemedicine and eHealth, both nationally and internationally.

Diabetes self-care

One way to approach bettering the health situation is to investigate user experiences and the importance of improving the feeling of empowerment. This is assessed in a project focusing on self-care for children with diabetes.

Today, the diabetes self-care involves frequent metering of the glucose level in the blood. This may be a daunting task for children, and there is a need for supervision.

Trying to make every-day life easier for the people involved in this kind of situation – the children and their parents – NST has developed a solution which makes it possible to monitor the blood glucose from a distance.

Wireless data transfer

Bluetooth wireless technology has made it possible to develop an automatic and wireless solution based on standard components, minimizing the impact on the patients’ every-day activities. This includes using a standard blood glucose meter, a connectBlue Bluetooth OEM Serial Port Module and a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone.

The connectBlue Bluetooth Serial Port Module simply replaces a RS232 cable between two devices. The small footprint of the module makes it easy to integrate with the users’ set of blood glucose metering equipment.

As the blood glucose meter features a serial communication port, the Bluetooth Serial Port Module conveniently enables the wireless communication between the meter and the mobile phone. The mobile phone runs an application that picks up the glucose data from the Bluetooth connection and transforms it into a SMS (text message). The message is sent automatically as an SMS over the GSM mobile phone network and is received at the supervisors’ end (e.g. parents), using a standard mobile phone. Provided the child’s phone is within range, the blood glucose data will automatically be sent when performing a metering.

Future Plans

Future plans involve sending the glucose data to health care specialists and diabetologists at care centers for statistical and follow-up purposes.

Using Bluetooth technology in combination with standard mobile phones and body sensors open up for other remote wireless health monitoring applications as well, and will become increasingly important in future health care systems and services.

About connectBlue

connectBlue™ is a leading provider of robust Industrial and Medical wireless solutions, designed and tested for the most demanding applications and environments. Based on Bluetooth technology, Wireless LAN (WLAN) and IEEE 802.15.4/ ZigBee, connectBlue provides ready-to-use products and modules as well as custom design solutions. connectBlue has its head office in Sweden and local offices in Germany and USA. For more information, visit www.connectblue.com

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