Diabetes self-management system : review of existing
systems and potential enhancements

Darwish, F; Saraee, MH

Abstract

Diabetes is a global pandemic with growing devastating human, social and economic impacts. By 2025 it is estimated that in the UK five million people will be diagnosed with diabetes and by 2030 diabetes will claim three lives every ten minutes. According to the most recent reports, 10% of the British National Health Service (NHS) budget for England and Wales is spent on diabetes, equating to £1.5m an hour. With diabetes increasing at its
current rate, this spending is unsustainable. The most shocking finding of this report is that almost four-fifth of NHS
diabetes spending is on preventable complications. Self-Monitoring and Self-Management systems play a significant
role in preventing and reducing diabetes complications. Minimising costs, and improving patient outcomes could be
achieved through self-management and empowering the diabetic patients with knowledge management (KM). This
research provides a review of existing monitoring and management systems which have been created by blood
glucose or insulin pump manufacturers. Initial findings suggest that profit rather than patient outcomes are the main motivator behind the existing systems. To this end, this research proposes that the prevalence of personal computers and mobile smart phones be leveraged to develop a web portal for diabetes self-management. This overcomes the limitation of the existing system, which is lack of ability to communicate with health professionals
and none of the existing options are free to the patient. The portal would facilitate a closer relationship between the
medical and diabetic communities. This strengthened relationship would allow patient and doctors to work together
to find effectively ways in which the damaging effects of this disease can be reduced. The proposed portal will help
patients to record each imperative health factor. This would simultaneously allow the doctor access to real-time
monitoring and give them the ability to communicate directly with the patients. Additionally, this paper investigates
the potential advantages of integrating knowledge management approaches to disseminate and share knowledge
among related parties.

Citation

systems and potential enhancements. Presented at 11th IEEE International Conference on Developments in eSystems Engineering (DeSE2018), Cambridge, UK

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: 11th IEEE International Conference on Developments in eSystems Engineering (DeSE2018)
• Conference Location: Cambridge, UK
• Start Date: Sep 2, 2018
• End Date: Sep 5, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Jul 1, 2018
• Publication Date: Sep 3, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jan 7, 2019
• Publisher URL: http://dese.org.uk/city-of-cambridge/
• Related Public URLs: http://dese.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/ProgrammeFull_DeSE2018_V7-1-1.pdf
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference