Diamate: Startup that change the habit for sweet lovers

Patients with diabetes is currently a major health problem that most worries medical and nutritionists. In Thailand, there are now more than 5 million diabetes patients, with the growth of 8% per year. The global level is more serious with more than 400 million patients around the world.

To cure diabetes, patients are required to control sugar in the blood as to prevent from other serious diseases such as kidney disease, stroke or having to cut a body’s part due to serious affect from diabetes.

“The challenge of combating diabetes is changing the patients’ behavior,” said Mr. Phongchai Petsanghan, the founder of ‘Diamate’ application that will help adjust behavior of diabetes patients. The inspiration came from the fact that his three family members passed away from diabetes. And from his own experience in taking care of patients with diabetes, he realizes that patients have to be careful about the food consumption. They have to control the level of sugar in blood and must always exercise to keep themselves fit.

But to make that effective, collecting of patient’s data on a daily basis is also important. Diamate developer them thus see that the application will be able to link the gap between patients and doctors while patients stay at home.

With this application, patients and those who have risks to get diabetes can take care of themselves at home by just sending sugar level to the system. The application will alert immediately when the sugar level is abnormal. The statistics will also be sent to doctors for further solutions. The application can also record and analyze eating behavior of patients and it also has the chat system which patients can consult with the health experts of the hospital.

Diamate’s target group is patients from the hospital. Initially, the developer focused on patients from both private and public hospitals. But after launching for a while, they expanded to general patients, not specific only to patients from network hospitals. The application also has a team of certified food specialists to help provide consultation on food as well.

“The application will have the function for patients to take photo of food they are about to eat and post on the application, then the health food specialists will give them advice on the proper proportion they should intake.”

“Normally, doctors have no idea about the patients’ behavior when at home. Seeing doctors for just 5-10 minutes can get them better just only 30-40% but the rest cannot take care of themselves.  With this application, it can send the information to the doctors. For public hospital, we have equipment to collect data too. After blood test, the data will be sent to the system immediately. For patients who have low sugar level, they can also press a button for emergency help. These features are better than general chat applications.”

At present, Diamate application have been downloaded 1,200 times and about 50% of them are active users of the application. The developer team expects to work with more hospitals to boost awareness of this application among target group.