Monday 16 September 2013

All the best from Continua!



As the Grand Tour nears the finish, my thoughts go out to the riders who have trained and prepared for this one-of-a-kind diabetes endurance exercise study and charity event. Continua Health Alliance is proud that its Design Guidelines have provided the framework to transmit and store the physiological data from the riders. Mobile networks are being used to transit the data throughout the ride, allowing the riders and all of us to track their health.

Clint with Eddie Merckx, who sent the riders off in good style from Brussels!
I was lucky enough to attend the start in Brussels, but the real excitement is taking place as the riders accumulate miles, enjoy beautiful vistas and challenge their fitness on the way to Barcelona. A subset of the riders is participating in a clinical study that will make it possible for all of us to join in the event and learn from their experience. These cyclists are sporting wearable sensors that relay their location, blood glucose and heart rate information through a series of channels to a web portal where you can track their progress. The real-time availability and capture of this information is what makes this event uniquely thrilling for the riders’ friends and family, cycling and mHealth enthusiasts and the many thousands of people who have, or care about someone with, diabetes.

I want to thank all of the participants for bringing attention to the issue of diabetes management, and especially those willing to take part in the study to demonstrate the value of mhealth and help explicate the relationship between blood glucose levels and endurance exercise. In addition to rigorous training, these riders had to learn about and become accustomed to the mHealth technologies they're using during the Grand Tour.

You can get an idea of how intense their training has been by looking through recent Twitter posts from some of the riders. You may also want to follow them on Twitter right now to get their personal perspectives on the Grand Tour experience, or to send messages of support. A few riders I’ve been watching this summer:

        Ian Hay on Twitter, @ikisai, riding for Orange Healthcare
        Paul Buchanan, tweeting for Team Blood Glucose
        Team BG member Rob Woolfson

Good luck to all the cyclists from the team at Continua!

Clint McClellan

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Clint McClellan is President and Chairman of the Continua Health Alliance, an international non-profit organization and the leading organization convening global technology industry standards to develop end-to-end, plug-and-play connectivity for personal connected health.

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