DarioHealth’s System Now Compatible With Latest iPhones

With mobile phone technologies changing ever so rapidly, companies offering digital health solutions have to continuously adapt and one such company is DarioHealth, which has just announced that its blood glucose monitoring system, which works with the aid of an app, is compatible with the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.

Apple announced the two phones just over a month ago and DarioHealth has been working on ensuring that the Dario LC Blood Glucose Monitoring System, which works with the Dario App, is compatible with the latest devices.

DarioHealth hopes to reach bigger market with iPhone XS, XS compatibility

DarioHealth Chief Executive Officer, Erez Raphael, said compatibility with the two new iPhones extended his company’s market reach and “also increases the value of our DarioEngage platform for healthcare providers and employers, who are looking for a patient coaching platform that seamlessly integrates with the patient’s mobile phone for real-time data and communication.”

Apple is expected to ship between 75 and 80 million iPhone XS and XS Max devices in the second half of 2018 and DarioHealth is hoping that a significant number of buyers will sign on to their app.

Raphael explained that DarioHealth’s digital health solutions were designed to “improve the health and wellbeing of people living with chronic conditions and the mobile phone is key point of contact, monitoring, and communication with patients.”

Digital health solutions providers need to continuously evolve

To illustrate how much providers of digital health solutions have to play catch up with mobile phone technological developments, only in March this year, DarioHealth announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had approved the use of Dario LC Blood Glucose Monitoring System on the older iPhone 7, 8, and X models.

This is because on the iPhone 7 and later devices, Apple dropped the headphone jack, which Dario’s glucose monitoring system used, and replaced it with a lightning connector, which DarioHealth conceded “posed a unique challenge.”

Barely six months later, Apple had released a new range of mobile phones and companies like DarioHealth have no choice but to respond. Before the launch of iPhone 7, Dario users would plug the glucose monitor into their phones using the audio jack and this would give them a reading of their blood sugar level. With Apple changing its phones, DarioHealth responded by developing a system that allowed its device to connect via the lightning port.

Raphael described the development of the new system and receiving FDA approval was a big breakthrough “for the Dario product on iPhone 7, 8 and X, and allows many of our past users who upgraded to these new iPhones to renew their Dario experience.”

One way for DarioHealth to stay ahead of these changes in mobile phone technology is to use Bluetooth connectivity instead of the audio jack, but Raphael insists that the company is not looking at going down that path, as they believe the connecting via the audio jack or lightning port is a faster and better option.

“For our solution, it was very important that our meter would not be functioning as a standalone, but would be an extension to the smartphone in order to do everything in the smartphone,” he told Business Insider in 2016.

In the long-run, DarioHealth is hoping that its product will become a lifestyle brand for people living with diabetes and not just a glucose monitor.

Wearables and monitoring market on growth trajectory

DarioHealth was founded in 2011 with a goal of allowing users of its system to analyze and personalize their chronic disease management.

“DarioHealth’s approach has taken the best of both worlds – the world of the wearable market, which is projected to reach $51.6 billion in just a few years, and the monitoring market that is climbing toward the $30 billion mark – and flipped traditional health upside down. We are moving from periodic data to continuous data, from general treatment to personalized treatment,” the company said on its website.

DarioHealth’s Blood Glucose Monitoring System has been cleared in the U.S. and is approved in Europe, Canada, and Australia. The system is commercially available in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Australia.

DarioHealth’s app is compatible with some devices on the Android platform such as the Samsung Galaxy S series, Samsung Galaxy Note series, and the  LG G series.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that more than 100 million people have diabetes or prediabetes in the U.S. and diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2015.

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