From us
My name is Isabella. I’m a robotics engineer specialising in machine learning and artificial intelligence — and I was diagnosed with diabetes as a child. Like many of you, I spend my days calculating, monitoring, analysing, recalling, waiting and worrying about the impact that every meal, activity and emotion will have on my body. For many years I’ve dreamed of offloading all this to a machine.
415 million of us live with diabetes. We each have our own approach to self-care using different drugs, devices and tools to manage our blood glucose levels. $673B is spent treating diabetes every year, and yet there have been very few big advances since the discovery of insulin over 100 years ago. Depending upon which type you’re diagnosed with, somewhere between 8% and 25% of us achieve the recommended blood glucose levels. We are all stuck — people with diabetes, our doctors, healthcare providers, researchers, and the life sciences industry — and we need a new approach.
We are all stuck — people with diabetes, our doctors, healthcare providers, researchers, and the life sciences industry — and we need a new approach.
I set up Ayuda to challenge fundamental beliefs about the definition, diagnosis and management of diabetes, and bring about new solutions. Cyndi is my co-founder, with 20 years of experience in starting, growing and leading global technology businesses. We believe diabetes is not a disease. It’s an umbrella term for a symptom of high blood glucose. The understanding of its many causes is incomplete, so only general treatments are possible. This leaves those of us with diabetes to map our prescribed treatment onto our own condition, using trial and error to continuously develop our own self-care heuristics.
I set up Ayuda to challenge fundamental beliefs about the definition, diagnosis and management of diabetes
We’re starting by building a mobile app that goes far beyond monitoring your blood glucose. It takes data from your existing diabetes devices, logbooks, and wearable sensors, and correlates it with changes in blood glucose to learn and improve your heuristics, and provide personalised self-care guidance in the moment.
As our app learns and takes on the heuristics of millions of people, we will bring together and formalise this massive source of untapped diabetes knowledge. With it, we will identify clusters of people with similar heuristics, and help them share with each other, as well as inspire new thinking across the broader diabetes ecosystem.
The challenge we face isn’t just about building an app (although we’re working on that right now!). It’s about using the knowledge you create doing your self-care everyday to radically change the thinking about diabetes and the way it’s managed. Today, we want to invite you along for the journey, and learn about you and your heuristics, so we can eventually offload them.
It’s about using the knowledge you create doing your self-care everyday to radically change the thinking about diabetes
If you’ve read this far then hopefully some of what we’re saying feels right — you must know how valuable your heuristics are to your day-to-day life. To stay updated on our progress, to learn more about other’s heuristics, and to get involved, please subcribe.
With love and thanks, Isabella (and Cyndi)
