Fighting Diabetes at Slush

Today is the World Diabetes Day. There are currently 371 million people living with this terrible disease.Heini Jokinen, a volunteer at Slush, who has diabetes, tells me that every single minute of her life she has to control what she eats, drinks, how much she exercises and how many insulin injections she has to make. I met Heini on the stage of the Slush Health Track, where she had come to find out what solutions there were for people like her at Slush. It turned out that Slush gathered three startups that are on the mission to make life easier for the people who have to fight this condition every day. 

One of them is Sensotrend, a Tampere-based startup that launched their product on the stage of the Health Track. Their solution allows people who suffer from diabetes to track their daily activities on one sheet and learn from the data that they gather. Mikael Rinnetmäki, one of the two founders of Sensotrend, who suffers from diabetes, comments: 

“Our tool is made by diabetics for diabetics. We want to remove frustration and make life easier for the people like myself. I never managed to keep logbooks to track my blood sugar level and the amount of carbs I eat, how much I have exercised and all the other factors that affect my blood sugar level. There are many solutions and applications already for tracking the data. Now we have built the tool that allows to  easily bring all this data together and make sense out of it”, Rinnetmäki continues. 

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Before digital revolution, diabetics should have written down all this manually to keep their illness in balance. Sensotrend helps these people to automate the data gathering. Not only the collected health information supports diabetic’s own balance keeping, but it also can be used for planning and improving the treatment with doctors. Healthcare organisations could learn from it as well. 

Mendor can hardly be called a startup – this is a mature company. But they are also on the mission to make life of the diabetics easier. Kristian Ranta, CEO of Mendor, was speaking about the concept of individualized care. Mendor produces a revolutionary easy-to-use portable all-in-one blood glucose meter and web-based software application for the daily management of diabetes. 

Last but not least, MealLogger is a solution that doesn’t particularly focus on diabetes but is used by many people with this condition. It is a visual and, more importantly, social food journal. “MealLogger is a social media for a healthy lifestyle. The social platform is built for discussions that people rather not share openly on Facebook or Instagram”, explains Michael Quarshie from Wellness Foundry. 

Users can join groups of their interest and create own public/private groups, for example for users with diabetes. With MealLogger, diabetics can follow their eating habits, share and discuss it with others. Following carbs is an essential daily activity for people with diabetes. 

The great thing about these startups is that they don’t see each other as competitors. Instead they are very eager to collaborate and battle the disease together! And we at Slush are very happy to provide a platform for these connections to happen. Keep up great work!

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