Brookes lead project to make your life better if you have diabetes

Brookes are leading a Euro Collaborative research project intending to help improve the lives of those with Type 1 Diabetes.

The project, PEPPER (Patient Empowerment through Predictive Personalised decision support), is a three year research project designed to develop and research technology to help someone with Type 1 diabetes to self manage their illness.

Brookes is shining the light on costly, groundbreaking research.

Diabetes is an illness that affects how your body controls it’s sugar intake. Type 1, you are either born with or can develop later in life. It develops before you are 40 normally and is the biggest cause of childhood diabetes. There is no cure known for diabetes but it can be managed through insulin injections and controlling sugar intake.

The funding comes from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme which brings together leading European universities and companies.

Researchers working on the project will create a personalised decision support system that will make predictions based on real-time data in order to empower individuals to self-manage their condition. The design of the system will involve patients, clinicians and carers at every stage to ensure that it meets user needs.

The research team

The system will have a strong emphasis on safety and will include features such as glucose level predictions, dose advice and alarms to raise the individuals’ awareness of the risk of hypoglycaemia or hyperglycaemia.

By preventing adverse episodes such as these, the system will improve lifestyle, monitoring and quality of life for patients as well as strengthening their interactions with healthcare professionals. The tool will offer bespoke advice by integrating personal health systems with broad and various sources of physiological, lifestyle, environmental and social data, together with an unobtrusive patch pump.

Research will be conducted into the development of artificial intelligence. The project will also examine the extent to which human behavioural factors and usability issues have previously hindered the wider adoption of personal guidance systems for chronic disease self-management.