Diabetes management app to launch

An app for diabetes patients is being launched in order to make the condition easier to manage.

The Quin diabetes management app could potentially make the condition easier to manage, thereby contributing towards reducing anxiety. 

As a result it could help the 25% of diabetics reported to have depression and the 40% diagnosed with anxiety.

GlobalData’s medical devices writer Chloe Kent said: “Unlike similar health management apps, which use an algorithm to correlate the input of all users’ data into a single consistent average, Quin’s management techniques are based entirely on a patient’s own data – crucial when it comes to managing a condition as individualised as diabetes.

“Quin chief technology officer Isabella Degen has been managing her diabetes with insulin for 26 years, and co-founded Quin five years ago. A portmanteau word for ‘Quantifying Intuition’ – which is something, the company’s website notes, that people who take insulin have to do several times a day – the app is designed to help diabetic people manage their insulin intake more efficiently.

Degen told GlobalData how the Quin app works, saying: “The app observes the trial and error of people who take insulin. They tell us when they eat something and tell us how much insulin they’re taking. The app itself is observing in the background how active they are, what time it is, and eventually things like location and menstruation and other stuff we can observe about them from the phone. Quin is essentially taking all that information and correlating it to people’s glucose outcomes.

“Let’s say you’ve had 100 lattes, and every time you’ve had a latte you’ve logged that and said how much insulin you’ve taken. Sometimes you may have taken it ten minutes earlier, sometimes later, and you take one to five units depending on what else is going on. The next time you come and say ‘okay, I’m going to have a latte right now’, Quin is looking to show you past decisions that worked well for you when having a latte and that match you right now, so the user can make a much more informed decision.

“Taking a drug where nobody knows how much of it to take, it’s quite stressful. To not have to do all the thinking and the fine tuning, to think ‘what should I do at this time’ or to even remember to make a decision, reduces the burden so that they can focus on what they want to focus on in their life.

“Right now we have a closed research project, so people can apply through the site to participate if they own the right kit and they’re on a treatment that we support at the moment. We give them access to a version of Quin that changes every month, and then we work together with these users to give us feedback.

“We’re planning to do a launch of the app in late 2020, which will then become available via the App Store. It will be a subscription-based business model, initially paid for directly by the customer but maybe also picked up by insurers in the future. We’re launching geographically in the CE mark [region], and we’re looking at starting the FDA approval process in the middle of this year.”