Medtronic and IBM Watson Unveil Cognitive Diabetes App Concept at CES

Omar & Ginni @ CES 2016

Yesterday at CES, Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak took center stage during IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s keynote address to unveil a research prototype concept for a first-of-its-kind cognitive app designed to help detect important patterns and trends for people with diabetes.

The yet-to-be-released app is being designed to provide relevant, real-time insights and coaching to help people improve their ability to understand the impact of daily activities on their diabetes and make adjustments as needed, and personalized diabetes management by applying Watson’s cognitive computing power to data from Medtronic’s wearable medical devices, including insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring devices. In an early research project analyzing a database of 600 de-identified patient cases, findings suggest that cognitive computing may be able to predict near-term hypoglycemic events up to three hours in advance of onset—early enough to enable a person with diabetes to take action and prevent a potentially dangerous health event.

Since IBM and Medtronic announced their partnership in April 2015, an immense amount of cooperative learning and discovery has happened at an incredible pace. The first research concepts being shown at CES illustrate just some of the solutions that could be brought to market by Medtronic.

Medtronic is also planning to develop a variety of other diabetes solutions that leverage Watson technology, such as solutions for healthcare systems and advancements in artificial pancreas technology to transform diabetes care.

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