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2016-01-18We have launched the world's unique web portal where a diabetic patient or their physician can upload the glucose level in subcutaneous tissue and the portal will automatically calculate and display a continuous curve of blood glucose level.

Our motivation to do so was as follows. A patient suffering from diabetes must be able to manage their blood glucose level in the desired range. As monitoring blood glucose level, due to an important discomfort to the patient it causes, can be done only sporadically, it is prefered to monitor glucose level in subcutaneous tissue, which is minimally invasive and can be done continuously. However, changes of blood glucose level cannot be always intuitively deduced from the continuously monitored glucose level in subcutaneous tissue. In the past, therefore, we proposed a sophisticated model of blood glucose dynamics thanks to which the blood glucose level can be calculated from the glucose values measured in subcutaneous tissue with an accuracy higher than is the case with other existing models. In order to get our model from academy to physicians and diabetics, we decided to develop a web portal that could display continuous blood glucose curve reconstructed from the glucose level of subcutaneous tissue. To our best knowledge, this is the very first web portal that does this.

By showing blood and interstitial fluid glucose levels together, the patient (or their physician) will see how the amount of food and its composition, duration and intensity of physical activity, insulin dosage and delay of insulin actions affect their glucose levels. Providing the patients with a web portal to study their glucose levels in the comfort of home helps them to realize all the complex feedback that affects quality of their lifes.

The portal is not tied to any proprietary software, and the data are anonymized. Determining parameters of the model of glucose dynamics is a computationally intensive task. As a solution we decided to profit from a combination of C++ and Java EE technologies. The calculation methods are implemented in C++ to ensure sufficient performance. Java EE enables us to implement a flexible and sustainable web interface. The portal is available at https://diabetes.zcu.cz. The expected feedback from the diabetes community will drive the ongoing development of the portal and the method of blood glucose level calculation.