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Intelligent Insulin Pens A luxurious instrument or an essential gadget ? — A qualitative study

Authors:
Mohammed Kalkattawi
Tatsuo Nakajima

Keywords: Electronic Medicine; Diabetes Mellitus; Insulin Therapy; Ubiquitous Computing; Cloud Computing

Abstract:
Insulin pens were first introduced in 1985. Since their introduction, insulin pens have been remarkable for their simplicity and accuracy. They have played a major role in the Multiple Dose Injection therapy (MDI). Until today, insulin pens, along with insulin pumping therapy, have been considered the only two reliable methods for external insulin delivery. Nevertheless, there has been always a wide gap between the two from the technological perspective. While pumps were enhancing through the utilization of several technologies, insulin pens have not had any major upgrades for a long period. Just recently, a couple of specialized diabetes companies have just introduced new types of intelligent insulin pens to the diabetes market. In this paper, we gave a brief introduction about the intelligent insulin pens technologies, and then we drew some general technological comparison between insulin pens and pumping equipments. In addition, we wanted to evaluate the current status of intelligent insulin pens technology among diabetic community, we went through a number of case studies among patients and obtained some feedback from their sides. We summarized the results from the case studies, and then we followed that by some discussions regarding the current technologies and our future vision for intelligent insulin pens. We believe that rather than focusing only on the development of intelligent insulin pens itself, we suggest that developers should give more focus on utilizing current ubiquitous technologies (i.e., smart devices, cloud computing, wearable computing, etc.). The main focus should aim on creating applications that can ease the diabetic management mission, and promote a better diabetic patients' compliance.

Pages: 217 to 223

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: February 22, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4359

ISBN: 978-1-61208-384-1

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 22, 2015 to February 27, 2015