Patent: System & Methods Optimized for Providing Alerts Optimized for a User

Diabetes mellitus remains very famous and prevalent across the world. People are advised to take a blood sugar test every once a while to check for their glucose levels and ensure that it is well within normal limits. This is usually done in a laboratory where the technician gives you the results in quite some time. But if you are a diabetic person who suffers from vagaries in blood glucose levels often you might be used to carrying a self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) kit that requires you to prick your finger every time for blood samples for measurement. We don’t like to prick ourselves every now and then which restricts us from measuring the values to anywhere between 2 and 4 times a day. Diabetes is a disease in which the pancreas cannot create enough insulin (type 1) or the insulin created is not effective (type 2) and the patient suffers from high glucose levels that can cause an array of physiological damages such as kidney failure, skin ulcers or bleeding into the vitreous of the eye. When such high are the stakes of diabetes it is not possible to allow the user to measure his/her glucose levels only 2-4 times a day between which the patient could enter hypoglycemic or hyperglycemic condition that can cause dangerous side effects. So, apart from taking measurements only at certain times of the day the individual might remain unaware of the rise and falls in blood glucose levels while using conventional methods of measurement.
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Apart from using SMBG for monitoring some diabetes patients use a continuous analyte sensor that measures the concentration of a specific analyte (in this case, its glucose) in the body and sends our raw signals that is shown as an output value in the display. This output value is expressed in a form that’s meaningful to the user, such as glucose expression in mg/dL. So, it now becomes a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and some of these monitors cautions the user with alerts and messages when there is a deviation in glucose values going into hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia. Though this sounds useful, there are many times during which the user starts ignoring the alarm or goes into ‘alert fatigue’ thereby disregarding the alert or turning it off without thinking about the consequences. For instance, after meals these devices might send out high glucose alerts. The user is already aware of the fact that glucose levels increase post-meals and hence, they tend to ignore these alerts or even turn off the alert option. Such measures can cause the user to miss out on further important alerts that come their way when glucose levels rise! There are problems with ‘low alerts’ too as the user might set a higher low alert threshold such that they get ample time to prepare for a severe hypoglycemic event. This might trigger frequent alerts of low blood glucose levels that are actually not severe enough to cause an event. Though the user expects an alert for severe lows the higher frequency of the alerts can cause the user to mistrust the device. The systems and methods patented here comes as a welcome change to the other ones mentioned here as it corrects all the flaws of these systems and alerts the user only when it makes sense to do so.

The systems and methods designed here alerts the user only after ensuring that the user is not already aware of their condition-such as when they are in a diabetic state that needs attention. The systems and methods alert the user when action is necessary such as a bolus or temporal base rate change but do not alert in times when there is no action required such as when the user is already aware of the rise in glucose levels or when a corrective action was already taken to keep it under control. Here, the alert system is optimized to provide fewer alarms than usually given when the system is unaware of the user’s cognitive awareness. The monitoring device might be a smart phone, a tablet computer, a smart watch or a dedicated monitoring device. The system predicts the cognitive awareness of the user by identifying whether the user has previously taken some action (such as eating a meal, consuming required medications or exercising) when there was a suspected risk of changes in blood sugar levels without any prompting or a clue. In order to alert the user, the system might include determining a clinical value of a glucose concentration to predict future diabetes state. When the user is not cognitively aware of the diabetic state needing attention, the system might alert the user with a user prompt after a certain delay not based on time but based on the emergency of the diabetic state needing attention.

The systems and methods described here provide ways to incorporate ‘smart alerts’ in analyte monitoring systems especially in continuous glucose monitoring systems. Once an alert is given the user might be requested to comment on the usefulness of the alert with buttons such as ‘Thank You’ and ‘Go Away’. The response from the user can in turn be used to predict future alerts for example, if an alert was provided two hours after a meal but was considered by the user as not being helpful the next alert could be given 2.5 hours after the meal. The user can also help to improve data efficiency-for instance, when a user would be performing a heavy working session he/she would be aware that their glucose would be outside normal ranges. Hence, the user can activate a setting on their monitor maybe click a button on the smartphone to activate a special ‘work out’ alert schedule. The patent was published on Nov 2nd, 2017 and for more information on the patent please visit:

United States Patent & Treaty Office: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=4&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=%22alerts+optimized%22&s2=Dexcom&OS=%22alerts+optimized%22+AND+Dexcom&RS=%22alerts+optimized%22+AND+Dexcom
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European Patent Office: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?II=0&ND=3&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=20181221&CC=CN&NR=109069073A&KC=A

World Intellectual Property Organization: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=US205407982&_cid=P20-JZXWZO-24775-1