Grant: Idea to Innovation

Diabetes is a chronic disease that leads to serious complications. It is estimated that 9 million Canadians are diabetic or pre-diabetic - that is about 1 in every 4 Canadians. We have been developing a personalized recommendation system, called GlucoGuide for Type-2 diabetes. Our system collects a variety of lifestyle data via patients' smartphones, mines the data with novel data-mining algorithms, and sends personalized recommendations to patients that can improve their diabetic conditions. We have conducted a three-month clinical trial with patients, and obtained very promising results. Roughly speaking, GlucoGuide can potentially turn an early diabetic patient into a pre-diabetic, and a pre-diabetic one into a non-diabetic. However, one cumbersome step of using GlucoGuide is to enter meter readings (from glucometers and so on) and food items. In this R&D project, we propose to use the camera function available on almost all smartphones, and develop specialized recognition systems for digit/character from meters, food labels, restaurant menus, and even for food items from pictures of food directly. Digit and character recognition has been studied by many researchers for many years, and some have been used in real life (such as postal code recognition for automatic mail sorting). We will improve these existing methods for a variety of specific devices that diabetes patients use (such as glucometers and blood pressure monitors). This can significantly improve the recognition accuracy of the general digit/character recognition methods. Food recognition from photos, on the other hand, is highly challenging. Currently few such systems or apps can do this. We plan to explore the very recent work of deep learning to learn to predict how healthy the food is specifically for diabetes patients. GlucoGuide for iOS devices (iPhone?, iPad?) will also be developed. We believe that this work would significantly improve the usability of GlucoGuide, and pave the way to commercialize GlucoGuide. This will bring huge benefits to the health of millions of Canadians who have type-2 diabetes.