Connected Insulin Pen Improves Diabetes Management

A smart insulin pen with fully automatic wireless data transfer helps patients and doctors achieve a new quality of medical care for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics.

The ESYSTA BT pen is equipped with an 868 MHz Bluetooth interface that automatically connects and transfers data on injected insulin doses directly into the patient’s digital blood glucose diary. The pen uses standard 3 ml cartridges, which means that it can be used with insulin supplied by Sanofi, Eli Lilly (Indianapolis, IN, USA), or Novo Nordisk. The pen is part of the ESYSTA web-based telemonitoring system, which also includes a base unit, a blood glucose meter, a smartphone app, and online portal.

The seamless documentation of insulin units and blood glucose levels are an important element of diabetes treatment, which has to be continuously documented and analyzed to achieve optimum metabolic control. With the aid of the pen and the ESYSTA app, treatment recommendations can be made in real-time, among other things using innovative “traffic light” algorithms. The ESYSTA BT pen and ESYSTA system are products of Emperra (Potsdam, Germany). Both hardware components and software solutions of the ESYSTA system are certified as CE-compliant.

“We are proud that we can use all U-100 insulins in 3 ml cartridges with the development of specially customized adapters,” said Janko Schildt, MD, founder and managing director responsible for medicine and technology at Emperra. “In combination with real insulin application data, I believe as a doctor that this constitutes an evolutionary leap for the digital age of diabetes management.”

“Often the patient’s entries are difficult to read or simply forgotten, and analyzing the data is laborious and time-consuming,” said Professor Klaus Kusterer, MD, PhD, a diabetologist from Mannheim (Germany). “Digital data recording can make a huge contribution to improving diabetes management. The data is complete and unadulterated, and the patient no longer has to remember to document their data at all.”

Insulin is a peptide hormone naturally produced by β cells of the pancreatic islets. It is important for the metabolism of carbohydrates, fats, and protein by promoting the absorption of glucose from the blood. Glucose production and excretion by the liver is strongly inhibited by high concentrations of insulin in the blood, and circulating insulin also affects the synthesis of proteins in a wide variety of tissues. In high blood concentrations it is therefore an anabolic hormone, promoting the conversion of small molecules in the blood into large molecules inside the cells. Low insulin levels in the blood have the opposite effect by promoting widespread catabolism.

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Eli Lilly
Emperra