What’s New at Tidepool?

I’m Christopher Snider, Tidepool’s community manager. I joined the Tidepool team about a year ago because I connected with Tidepool’s vision of liberating diabetes data from different devices, creating a single space for data from insulin pumps, continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and blood glucose meters. There’s something special about seeing data from my t:slim X2, Dexcom G5 and Verio IQ (or any of the devices supported by Tidepool) line up nicely on a single screen. The fact that Tidepool is a nonprofit organization and we provide our software for free to people with diabetes and diabetes clinicians makes my work that much sweeter.

As community manager, I represent Tidepool within the diabetes community in the form of our emails (that’s my smiling face in the signature) and social media posts. Conversely, I also represent the diabetes community to the rest of the Tidepool team when new features are being discussed and designed by ensuring your feedback and comments are brought to the forefront. This means I hold a unique perspective as we work on implementing new features, adding support for new devices and expanding the potential of the Tidepool platform.

When I look back at everything that was happening at Tidepool the last time we showed up on the Beyond Type 1 and everything we’ve accomplished since, the phrase that comes to my mind is “refined ambition.” We continue to iterate on what it means to be a nonprofit organization with a mission to make diabetes data accessible, actionable and meaningful all while focusing on delivering awesome software, for free, to people with diabetes, their care team and clinicians. And along the way, we continue to improve upon what we believe Tidepool can represent to the diabetes, and broader healthcare community.

We are the first multi-device platform to support uploading Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre. We added the ability to upload data from Medtronic 523, 723 and 530G insulin pumps directly to Tidepool. We launched Tidepool Mobile for iOS and allow Tidepool users to connect their Dexcom accounts to Tidepool with the click of a button, expanding opportunities to see your CGM data in Tidepool. We also improved the speed and functionality of the Tidepool Uploader, the software that uploads your diabetes data from supported devices on your Mac or Windows computer.

We launched the Tidepool Big Data Donation Project, allowing people to donate their anonymized data to research and innovation, and support other diabetes nonprofit organizations, like Beyond Type 1, along the way. We are one of nine companies, and the only nonprofit, open source organization to be selected for the FDA’s Digital Health Software Pre-certification Pilot Program, a program that will modernize and revolutionize how the FDA evaluates and regulates digital health software.

And we’ve signed on several new clinical study partners who will use the Tidepool Clinical Study Platform to help expand knowledge, and improved outcomes and therapies for the diabetes community.

As exciting as updates like these are to share with the diabetes community, what really excites me are our ambitious goals for the rest of 2018. We will be launching official international support of Tidepool, including being compliant with GDPR, the new EU data privacy regulations (this is a really, really big deal for us). Along with more blood glucose meters, we will add Medtronic MiniMed® 630G, 640G and 670G insulin pumps to our list of supported devices. And, we will launch Tidepool Mobile on Android (as a member of Team Android myself, I’m really looking forward to this one).

Because of the data you’ve donated to the Tidepool Big Data Donation Project, we will share over $80,000 with our diabetes nonprofit partners like Beyond Type 1, JDRF, Children with Diabetes, College Diabetes Network, DiabetesSisters, Nightscout Foundation, CarbDM, Diabetes Youth Foundation (DYF) and the diaTribe Foundation.

What does all of this mean for you? It means you have a lot to look forward to from us as Tidepool continues to redefine how we can interact with our diabetes data. As always, Tidepool will remain free for you, me and the rest of the diabetes community to use. We’ll focus on the hard part of liberating and visualizing your diabetes data from your meters, pumps and CGMs in an intuitive and engaging way, while you just focus on living your life beyond the limitations diabetes tries to place on you.

If you want to take a peek at your diabetes data to see what you can learn, head over to Tidepool and create your free account.

Yours in data,

Christopher Snider
Community Manager

Looking to sign up to Tidepool or donate your data? Visit here.