City lad designs app for instant doc advice to diabetics

Aditi Tandon

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Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 7

A new mobile application is making waves for its special feature that allows diabetes patients to get instantaneous advice from their treating doctors.

Developed by Chandigarh boy Adavya Bhutani, the free Android-based mobile application is unique in that it not just enables patients to monitor and maintain blood sugar logs but also connects them to consultants in case of an emergency.

“The application will let patients of diabetes connect with treating doctors in case of abnormal blood sugar levels. Fasting blood sugar level, post-meal and random levels of blood sugar have all been fed into the application. The patient has to simply fill his levels in the application. If the levels are normal, the application will advise the patient to continue with the existing treatment. If these are out of range, the patient will have the option of choosing “consulting the doctor”, who will get a notification on his phone and thereafter render instant medical advice to avert any emergency,” Bhutani says.

For the application to work, the patient and his treating doctor both need to download the same from Google.

“The whole range of diabetes medicines are part of the application and the treating consultant has to simply change the medication to avert a complication should the patient contact the consultant on the mobile application,” says Bhutani, a 17-year-old computer science student of Grade XII at Chandigarh’s Strawberry Fields High School.

The application was recently launched in India and had clocked a few hundred downloads with some city doctors using it to address patient load in OPDs. Bhutani, who wants to pursue computer sciences in the US, said his application was scalable.

Asked what incentive would doctors have to use the application, Bhutani said the incentive was reduction in daily patient load given the massive prevalence of diabetes and better treatment outcomes due to instant access to patient blood sugar results should the patient want to consult the doctor on the application.

The WHO estimates 69.2 million Indians currently suffer from diabetes — the highest globally and the number will reach 98 million by 2030.

On his inspiration for the application, Bhutani said, “Diabetes patients need to monitor their blood sugar levels frequently and abnormal levels almost always need changes of medications and diet to prevent complications. When I saw many people were stressed due to this and were taking inappropriate doses because of not being able to connect with the doctor right away, I decided to design the application to bridge the physical gap between the patient and the doctor.”