Tidepool and JDRF Collaborate on Big Data Donation to Drive Diabetes Research

The Tidepool Big Data Donation Project is an opt-in program designed to help students, academia, and industry innovate faster and expand the boundaries of knowledge about diabetes. Users of Tidepool’s software tools may choose to donate their data. Tidepool then anonymizes it, stripping it of all identifying information, including name, email address, custom labeled profiles, and device identifiers, before including it in the pool of datasets that are made available to data partners and researchers. To date, over 10,000 donors have contributed to Tidepool’s Big Data Donation Project.

The license agreement between the two charities allows for eight research teams spanning 12 institutions selected for grant awards from JDRF, the leading global organization funding type 1 diabetes research, access to valid, real-world patient data. The research teams, who possess cutting-edge skills and experience in both T1D and advanced, state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, may use this anonymized data in simulations to build models in the development of new strategies for diabetes management, or in general to uncover novel real-world insights into how to better treat people with diabetes -- with a specific focus around next-generation automated insulin delivery techniques.