Many of us who have had to either directly receive or help administer the many forms of testing for glucose levels or  giving diabetes medication well know about the difficulty, inconvenience and inaccuracy of taking readings - largely dependent upon the dreaded needle. Whether doing finger pricks to draw blood or giving insulin shots, it’s a process that for many can be scary, uncomfortable, and in the modern day can seem crude.

But better days are ahead, thanks to revolutionary innovations pioneered by forward-thinking minds in medical technology. Dr. David Klonoff is known as the founding father of modern diabetes treatment, and has applied the Internet of Things model to measuring glucose levels.

"Blood glucose testing with pricking the finger and getting a drop of blood is going to be replaced by continuous glucose monitoring," Dr. Klonoff told KUAM News. "And this is a really amazing technology, with a tiny wire that’s like a hair that goes under the skin.  It sits there, and it’s attached to a tiny ball that’s outside the skin and the wire measures glucose continually, and the ball sends a message to a smartphone, which sends the information to the cloud."

Dr. Francisco Pasquel, himself an accomplished physician, has contributed substantially in the diagnosing and treating the disease, using data at Internet-scale.

"The ability to monitor remotely those glucose levels for patients, for example in the ICU, we’re monitoring them outside of the room and that data can go to the cloud and we can generate reports. It’s moving quickly and we’re thinking about population health management, so we can have dashboards that identify people of the highest risk," he explained.

These big thinkers see immeasurable value in incorporating samples from Guam patients, enriching the datasets with diversity from people in this part of the world.

Said Klonoff, "We’re looking at a dataset of people from Guam. And it’s very possible that the best treatments for Guam are not the same as the best treatments for people somewhere else."

And by using cutting-edge artificial intelligence based on massive datasets, decisions can be made about detecting diabetes at an early level. "Having these conversations equity," noted Dr. Pasquel, "making sure that there’s no bias in telling us how to treat patients. So finding the ways so that we have unbiased algorithms that identify the patients with the highest risk with the right medications and the appropriate treatment. I think that’s where we should go."

Still, says Dr. Klonoff, the fundamentals of good health practices remain the driving forces of reversing the effects of diabetes.

"The very best treatments for diabetes involve having a healthy lifestyle. I am interested in technology, but what people eat, how much they exercise and whether they take their medicine is even more important than any technology in the world," he said.