DiabetEase

Comprehensive Glucose & Insulin Management

Simplifying Diabetes Care…

DiabetEase is a proposed wearable platform that integrates continuous glucose monitoring with coordinated insulin and glucose delivery to reduce the daily burden of Type 1 diabetes management. I led early‑stage ideation and needs‑finding, identifying gaps in convenience and invasiveness through market and landscape research and defining the core problem: current tools work, but they demand constant user intervention and diminish quality of life.

Our team then developed design criteria and validation strategies to ensure real‑world feasibility, ultimately converging on a minimally invasive microneedle‑based architecture for continuous monitoring and dosing. I also shaped the testing and validation plan by outlining key failure modes, defining quality‑control requirements such as adhesive durability, leakage risk, and microneedle fragility, and drafting early experimental protocols to support the platform’s progression toward a safe, user‑centered medical device.

The Solution

Microneedle technology is widely used in the beauty industry in pens and rollers that enhance skin absorption of active ingredients by creating micro-channels in the epidermis with minimal pain or bleeding. Beyond cosmetics, research shows microneedles’ core value lies in their ability to pierce the skin barrier without nerve stimulation, potentially enabling precise transdermal delivery of drugs and macromolecules that would otherwise be difficult to administer non-invasively.

Diagram showing hollow microneedles used for drug or vaccine delivery and monitoring purposes. The left side illustrates drug/vaccine particles passing through the microneedles into the skin, while the right side shows interstitial fluid moving through the microneedles for monitoring.

Visualization of microneedle based drug delivery from Álvaro Cárcamo-Martínez’s research in medical applications of hollow microneedles.

DiabetEase is designed as a compact, wearable patch that integrates continuous glucose monitoring with coordinated insulin and glucose delivery through a minimally invasive microneedle interface. The CAD architecture emphasizes user comfort, modular fluid reservoirs, and a sealed electronics enclosure to support reliable daily wear. This design prioritizes simplicity, safety, and manufacturability, laying the groundwork for a single device that reduces the burden of managing multiple diabetes tools.

CAD render of our proposed product.