After seeing his parents battle diabetes for 25 years, an entrepreneur made a smart blood sugar tracker

Shreekant Pawar (second from right) with the Diabeto team.

For Shreekant Pawar, his parents were the “first validation” of what he’d just made and is now hoping to sell. After seeing their ongoing battle with diabetes for 25 years, he’s now got them using the smart blood sugar tracker that his startup has made. The gizmo and accompanying app also help Pawar to monitor his parents’ blood sugar levels and receive alerts if the numbers drop.

Now, after more than three years of preparation work and six hardware prototypes, India-based startup Diabeto is crowdfunding on Indiegogo. It’s selling a little gadget that plugs into an array of glucometers. The bird-shaped device then wirelessly beams data and readings to the free mobile app. This augments the glucometer by allowing diabetes sufferers to see their blood sugar history and track trends or worrying changes. In addition, users can input their insulin intake, food, and mood to get a much clearer picture of their health. Users can grant concerned relatives access to all this data for remote monitoring.

Pawar, the CMO and co-founder of Diabeto, explains to Tech in Asia that his parents were early testers of the Diabeto gadget and app. “They wanted certain features tweaked, such as medication input,” he says.

Growing health challenge

Diabeto is aimed at smartphone-owning individuals with type 2 diabetes. Pawar says the startup, which has offices in India and the US, will focus initially on the North American and European markets once they’ve set up distribution deals. After that, the team is contemplating Japan and Singapore as their best points of entry into Asia.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 29 million Americans have diabetes right now, and another 86 million adults have prediabetes, “where their blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be classified as type 2 diabetes.” Across Europe, the WHO believes there are “about 60 million people with diabetes in the European Region.” It adds that high blood glucose kills about 3.4 million people annually around the world.

The Diabeto gadget (shown in pink) plugs into a glucometer to pull in data.

The current Diabeto Indiegogo campaign – which promises to ship the gadget (pictured above), which starts at US$49 to buyers by September – is looking to raise US$10,000 and has already soared past that goal with 38 days left. But why such a modest crowdfunding goal when many startups raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for their hardware? “It’s ready for manufacturing,” Pawar explains. “We’ve got the packaging done, we’ve actually got most of our homework done, so we just wanted to get the product into the market. […] And we just wanted to check how’s it going, how’s the demand, and gauge the response.”

See: Twitter just acquired India’s most fascinating startup

Doctor, doctor