I participated in the PennApps hackathon in Philadelphia this weekend. While most of the city was struck with a bad snow storm, a group of hackers holed up inside the Penn engineering buildings to work on some cool hacks. My team consisting of three other hackers: Daniel, Alex and Madhur, decided to work on an app that could predict blood glucose levels of diabetes patients by building machine learning models.
We used the OneTouch Reveal API to gather some data provided by the Johnson & Johnson’s company. They are the manufacturers of OneTouch glucose monitors for diabetes patients. They also give their patients an app for tagging events like exercise (light, moderate, heavy etc.), when they eat food and use insulin (different kinds – fast acting, before/after meals etc.). Our team thought that it might be a good idea to hack on this dataset to find out whether we could predict patients’ glucose levels without them having them to punch a hole in their fingers. A real world use case for this app would be to alert a patient when we predicted unusual glucose levels or have them do an actual blood test when the confidence on our predictions falls low.
We observed mixed results for the patients in our dataset. We did reasonably well for those with more data, but others had very few data points to make good predictions. We also saw that our predictions became more precise as we considered more data. Another issue was that the OneTouch API did not give sufficient information about food and exercise events for any of the patients – mostly without additional event tagging. As a result, our models were not influenced much by them.
We believe that in the near future, it would be common for the patients to have such monitors communicate with other wearable sensors such as smart watches. Such systems would be able to provide ample information about one’s physical activity etc., to make more meaningful predictions possible. Here’s a video demonstrating our proof-of-concept:
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It is cool