Diabeteasy | Devpost

Why

Type 2 diabetes can be incredibly tough, especially when it leads to complications. I've seen it firsthand with my uncle, who suffers from peripheral neuropathy. Watching him struggle with insensitivity in his feet, having to go to the doctor regularly for new insoles just to manage the pain and prevent further damage—it’s really painful. It's constantly on my mind how easily something like a pressure sore could become something more serious, risking amputation. It's heartbreaking to see how diabetes quietly affects his everyday life in ways people do not even realize.

What

Our goal is to create a smart insole for diabetic patients living with type 2 diabetes. This insole is designed with several pressure sensors placed at key points to provide real-time data on the patient’s foot pressure. By continuously processing this data, it can alert both the user and their doctor when any irregularities or issues are detected. What’s even more powerful is that, based on this data, the insole can adjust to help correct the patient’s walking stance. This small but important correction can help prevent painful foot ulcers and, hopefully, make a real difference in their quality of life.

How we built it

We build an insole with 3 sensors on it (the sensors are a hackathon project on their own), that checks the plantar pressure exerted by the patient. We stream and process the data and feed it to another model sole that changes shape based on the gait analysis so it helps correct the patients walk in realtime.

Concurrently we stream the data out to our dashboard to show recent activity, alerts and live data about a patient's behavior so that doctors can monitor them remotely- and step in if any early signs of neural-degradation .

Challenges we ran into and Accomplishments that we're proud of

So, we hit a few bumps in the road since most of the hackathon projects were all about software, and we needed hardware to bring our idea to life. Cue the adventure! We were running all over the city—Trader Joe's, Micro Center, local makerspaces—you name it, we were there, hunting for parts to build our force sensor. When we couldn’t find what we needed, we got scrappy. We ended up making our own sensor from scratch using PU foam and a pencil (yep, a pencil!). It was a wild ride of custom electronics, troubleshooting hardware problems, and patching things up with software when we couldn’t get the right parts.

In the end, we’re super proud of what we pulled off—our own custom-built sensor, plus the software to bring it all together. It was a challenge, but we had a blast, and we're thrilled with what we made in the time we had!

What we learned

Throughout this project, we learned that flexibility and resourcefulness are key when working with hardware, especially under tight time constraints, as we had to get creative with available materials.

As well as this - we learnt a lot about preventative measures that can be taken to reduce the symptoms of diabetes and we have optimistic prospects about how we will can continue to help people with diabetes.

What's next for Diabeteasy

Everyone in our team has close family affected by diabetes, meaning this is a problem very near and dear to all of us. We strive to continue developing and delivering a prototype to those around us who we can see, first hand, the impact and make improvements to refine the design and execution. We aim to build relations with remote patient monitoring firms to assist within elderly healthcare, since we can provide one value above all; health.