The Design Challenge concept was born in Spring of 2007, when creator of DiabetesMine Amy Tenderich posted an Open Letter to Steve Jobs, calling for the gurus of consumer design to help revolutionize design of diabetes devices.
San Francisco-based design firm Adaptive Path actually came forward to tackle the challenge head-on.
Their team created a prototype for a new combo insulin pump / continuous glucose monitor called the Charmr. It’s about the size of a USB stick, with a flat, color touch screen and can be worn on a chain as a necklace or dangled on your keychain!
Watch the video about this visionary creation here.
In the weeks and months that followed, numerous individuals and organizations came forward with more compelling new prototypes, designs, and ideas. These included new concepts for glucose meters, insulin pumps, lancing devices (for testing blood glucose), devices for transporting medical records or tracking glucose results, diabetes supply carry cases and more.
In Spring of 2008, we hosted the first official DiabetesMine Design Challenge here on the site. We sparked the imagination of hundreds across the nation.
Then in 2009, with the help of the California HealthCare Foundation, we were able to take the contest to a whole new level with a Grand Prize of $10,000. That competition was an even bigger success! We received over 150 amazingly creative entries from students, entrepreneurs, developers, patients, parents, caregivers and more.
Learn about the 2009 Grand Prize winner, a system integrating an insulin pump right into the iPhone, called LifeCase/LifeApp, by clicking here.
Samantha Katz, a Northwestern graduate student who co-created the LifeCase concept, went on to become a product manager at Medtronic Diabetes! She later became one of our esteemed judges.
2010 was another blockbuster year. 
Once again, dozens of universities participated, including Carnegie Melon, MIT, Northwestern, Pepperdine, Stanford, Tufts, UC Berkeley and the University of Singapore, to name a few.
We were able to expand the honors to three Grand Prize Winners, each receiving $7,000 in cash, plus a package aimed at helping them move forward with their design idea. Learn about the amazing 2010 winners here. The Zero, pictured right, is a great example of a visionary combo diabetes device from a talented freelance designer, this one from Turin, Italy.
2011 was the crowning glory, with three amazing Grand Prize winners, and the initiation of the first-ever DiabetesMine Innovation Summit held at Stanford University.
Our Grand Prize winners were:
Pancreum, a futuristic modular three-part “wearable artificial pancreas” that takes the combination of
tubeless insulin pumping and continuous glucose monitoring to the next level.
BLOB, a small, portable insulin-delivery device unlike anything we’ve seen before. It can be carried in a pocket or worn on a neck-chain, and even incorporates a coolant for those who live in warmer climates.
diaPETic, an iPhone/iPod touch application that helps a glucose meter to “acknowledge the user as a human being.”
→ See highlighted entries from all three years of the DiabetesMine Design Challenge here.
→ Learn about the DiabetesMine Innovation Summit event here.
What we’re especially proud of, and excited about, is that this contest motivated many young designers to focus on diabetes and health issues, to improve life for everyone living with chronic illness.
Also, according to the Chicago Tribune, the DiabetesMine Design Challenge has “generated a buzz in the industry and … help(ed) revolutionize the design of diabetes devices for the nation’s 24 million diabetics.”
This year, we’re turning our attention to Patient Voices, and an expanded Innovation Summit event at Stanford University in November 2012.
We hope YOU’ll be a part of it!
