A team of engineers and clinicians from the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Children's Hospital and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals have developed an electronic system to provide automated collection, delivery, analysis and feedback of a patient's blood glucose measurement via wireless technology for remote medical monitoring and feedback by a clinician.

The compact monitor is a compatible "add on" to existing glucose meters and communicates wirelessly with the patient's mobile phone. The phone then sends text messages to a server automatically; bespoke software then stores these readings in a database in order to present, analyse and prioritise the data to the clinician to provide feedback to the patient as appropriate. The system offers several advantages over current practice as it is does not require expensive hardware and is compatible with any wireless-enabled mobile phone, making use of existing ICT infrastructure.

The system may be particularly useful in both juvenile and elderly diabetics who often have difficulty in managing their blood glucose. Type I diabetics follow a strict daily regime for management of blood glucose levels, a process facilitated by several blood glucose tests each day. In 2003, there were a total of 517 million diabetics in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK and the USA (World Health Organisation, WHO). Around 10% of this population had Type 1 diabetes.

It is estimated that diabetes related complications cost the NHS around £1.2 billion annually. In the US, the healthcare costs for a person with diabetes are estimated at over $13,000 per year. Current opinion is that better management of blood glucose levels can lead to a 40% cost reduction in diabetes related complications. In North America alone, $98 billion is spent per year on the care and impact of diabetes.

The Sheffield technology will help improve quality of life for patients as well as reducing the cost of diabetes to healthcare providers.

We have filed a patent application which relates to a telemedicine system to remotely monitor health parameters.

We are currently seeking a development partner to realise the commercial potential of this system. It is envisaged that the base technology will be utilised to address patient healthcare management across a variety of medical conditions. The back-end software enables prioritisation of the data according to the requirement of healthcare professionals and thereby empowering targeted intervention.

We are also exploring the potential of the monitor and software to measure other physiological parameters.