One Drop and Fitbit Announce Diabetes Collaboration

^{Credit: PRNewsfoto/One Drop}

Two big names in the connected health sphere announced today a collaboration to integrate services for diabetes care. One Drop, which makes mobile-connected glucose monitoring devices, will now incorporate data from Fitbit monitors and watches to give users an even more detailed look at their health and condition.

The fitness data will sync with the One Drop Mobile app, allowing users to see things like how their physical activity is impacting their blood sugar. Beginning in November, users will be able to link the Fitbit data to their One Drop accounts.

One Drop CEO Jeff Dachis says data on 4 essential building blocks allow patients a complete picture of their diabetes: diet, medication, exercise, and glucose. A partnership with Fitbit allows them to provide “robust, to-the-second access to people’s data.”

The arrangement began with a few months of cursory conversation before coming together quickly, Dachis tells Healthcare Analytics News™. He says One Drop users had been clamoring for integration with their fitness trackers, and the lack of it was a “thorn in [his] side,” he says.

“For years, people with diabetes never had access to all of those pieces of information. They had them separately,” Dachis says. “But they never had the means to combine them.”

Now, he adds, the 2 companies are compiling that data, running predictive analytics over the cloud, and producing insights that can help people make better choices.

One Drop already pairs fitness data from the Apple Watch. Between that device and Fitbit, it will now sync with a sizeable share of the wearable market. An app for Fitbit’s new Ionic watch is also in development, and Dachis indicated that it would be available sometime in the first quarter of 2018.

“People, for what it’s worth, love their Fitbits,” he says. “We wanted to make sure that people that were utilizing Fitbit as an activity tracker had the ability to bring that data into One Drop and make it usefully for managing diabetes and prediabetes.”

Currently, the One Drop Mobile app has more than 600,000 users and is available for free in 195 countries. The app tracks track fitness metrics, but integration with fitness wearables allows for a “level of granularity and enhancement that wasn’t possible before,” the executive notes.

“Our goal is to transform the lives of every single person on the planet who has diabetes and a smartphone,” Dachis says. He estimates the number of people who could benefit from the platform might be as high as a billion.

The company’s connected glucose monitors and test strip subscriptions are available in about 30 countries, with Canada set to join that list next week. In conjunction with the collaboration, Dachis says, users of the app would shortly be offered discounts on Fitbit devices.