Diabetes technology. State of the art

Diabetes technology is nowadays well established in diabetes therapy. The rapid development of the technological options is contrasted by questions about the clinical efficacy of the usage in daily life. Adequate training of patients is necessary in order to enable usage of all technical options. Many of the instruments used for self-monitoring of blood glucose levels provide a high measurement quality, especially if they are able to compensate preanalytical errors. If the measurement results are used by patients for an immediate and appropriate adjustment of therapy, the investment in such a measurement can be of benefit also in non-insulin-treated patients. In this sense usage of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is also useful if patients use such systems regularly and know how to avoid, for example hypoglycemic events by appropriate reaction to the values displayed. In combination with insulin pumps CGM can be used for an automatic response to low glycemic levels, i.e. infusion of the basal rate is stopped automatically by the pump for a maximum of 2 h. The rapid progress seen in information technology will most probably give diabetes technology in general a considerable "push" forward.