GlucOracle is a tool for personal meal-time forecasting in diabetes. If you have diabetes, you may have wondered how your next meal will impact your blood glucose. Will it help your BG stay within moderate levels, or will it cause it to go up? We find that making such predictions can be challenging, and diabetes self-management may feel like a lot of guesswork.
GlucOracle was designed to help individuals with diabetes make more informed nutritional choices. It uses a sophisticated set of machine learning techniques to train your personal model of blood glucose regulation. Once the model learns how your body works, it can anticipate how your new meals will impact your post-meal blood glucose (BG) levels.
The main purpose of GlucOracle is to help you make informed choices about your meals. As you are thinking about your next meal, take a picture of what you plan to eat, enter your current BG level, and look at the forecast. If you are happy with the outcome, bon appetite! However, if you are not happy with your predicted post-meal BG level, try to change something in your meal. For example, you can change portion sizes of different parts of the meal such as adding or removing side dishes. Take another picture and see if the change in the meal lead to the change in BG forecast. Do not settle until you are happy with both your planned meal and the predicted BG levels.
Every time you record a meal and BG level before and after the meal, GlucOracle learns how your body reacts to nutrition. It is a complex process and it takes some time for the model to start generating forecasts. The more records you capture, the sooner it will start generating predictions, and the more accurate the predictions will be. Find out more about the science behind the model here
The model takes nutrition in your meals and your blood glucose levels as inputs and generates a prediction for how your blood glucose will change after each new meal. Unfortunately, there are few good tools for accurately estimating nutrition in meals. Because you know what you eat the best, and because we want to give you the best forecast while it is still useful, we need your best guess at nutrition in your meals. However, we know that estimating nutrition is hard. That is why GlucOracle will send all of your meals to Amazon Mechanical Turk using a crowdsourcing workflow developed by our colleagues at Harvard University. Find out more about the workflow here
Keep recording your meals and BG levels! The model needs at least 20 meals with BG levels before and after these meals to start generating predictions. In the meantime, we will help you keep an eye on nutrition in your meals and compare your own assessments with those generated by the crowd.
GlucOracle is a result of an inter-disciplinary research initiative at Columbia University. It utilizes sophisticated mathematical modeling techniques that combine validated physiological models and modern data science. Follow this link to learn more about the science behind GlucOracle.