The State of TuAnalyze, Jan-2011

We launched TuAnalyze in May 2010 in partnership with Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, with the goal of empowering members of TuDiabetes (and EsTuDiabetes) to track, share and compare their health information for research advancing diabetes care and public health response.

In the Fall of 2010, we launched a survey module as part of the application and in December, a Spanish version was launched on EsTuDiabetes (our sister community in Spanish) under the name EsTuAnalisis. Today, I have more news about TuAnalyze and quite a few valuable lessons learned from the project to share with you.

Recent Improvements
If you go to the TuAnalyze map, you may notice a few changes:

If you are not logged in or haven't set up an account with TuAnalyze, you will notice the map is now bigger... and (you noticed in the screenshot below!!) there are new countries that have lit up! As of this writing, Argentina has lit up. If you are logged in and have set up an account with TuAnalyze, you need to zoom out by clicking on the "-" sign on the top left (below the "Map" heading), to see the full map.
After the US, Canada and Mexico (the 3 countries for which we are lighting up regions on a state by state/province by province basis), and given the distribution of our membership around the world, we found it made sense to start lighting up the map on a country basis.

If you click on a region (state, province or country) for which at least some people have entered and shared their A1c data, you will notice a little pop-up appear that shows how many more people need to share their data for the region to light up. For example, as you can see below, as of today the UK needs 7 more people has already lit up on the map too! Yet Australia needs 13 people to enter their A1c so it can light up!

To preserve anonymity, regions continue to be lit up only once a certain number of participants have signed up and shared their A1c data. But you will notice, the legend on the map shows as grayed out the regions for which we have people participating: this includes people from 43 countries!

We want to make sure that the data we have in TuAnalyze is as close as possible to a fresh representation of our community. We encourage you to enter and update your A1c's (you can enter as many A1c values as you want) and tell your friends about TuAnalyze, by clicking on the little "Share" icon directly above the TuAnalyze map. With YOUR help, we can light up the entire world map with our A1c averages!

Things TuAnalyze has taught us

To explain some of the key things that TuAnalyze has shown us so far, we put together a video just under 3 minutes long, with excerpts from a longer interview with Elissa R. Weitzman, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School | Children's Hospital Boston and one of the key people that works with us in this amazing project:

If you want to listen to the full 12-minute long interview and read through the complete slides, click on the SlideShare below.

Summary

In short, we're learning A LOT about TuDiabetes and EsTuDiabetes from the data we're gathering through TuAnalyze. But to paint a comprehensive picture of the communities we need you to:

Enter your A1c and take the TuAnalyze survey, if you haven't. Some people have signed up for the application but haven't entered any A1c numbers. It is as easy as 1-2-3:
If you have already signed up for TuAnalyze, please enter any new A1c values you may have since the last time you visited. You know how little it takes... and you know how much it helps!

For now, that's all! Thanks for your continued support and let's keep rocking!

Tags: A1c, boston, children's hospital, community, data, depression, diabetes, harvard medical school, hemoglobin, public health, More…research, tuanalyze, tudiabetes

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Permalink Reply by Scott K. Johnson on January 21, 2011 at 5:44pm

Great stuff Manny - thank you!

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Permalink Reply by acidrock23 on January 21, 2011 at 5:50pm

Thanks Manny! I love the map. It reminds me of "Casablanca" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark", when the planes fly around the world w/ the Nazi fighters. Great stuff!

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Permalink Reply by Dude on January 22, 2011 at 12:13pm

Thanks for that! Now I can't look at the map without having the Raiders Theme Music going in my head! :)

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Permalink Reply by acidrock23 on January 22, 2011 at 1:56pm

heh heh heh. I have a couple of hats too!

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Permalink Reply by Dude on January 22, 2011 at 2:01pm

Quick! Pass Me the Whip!

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Permalink Reply by Manny Hernandez on January 21, 2011 at 9:47pm

I have to admit it does bear somewhat of a Raiders of the Lost Ark resemblance! :)

So you've entered all A1cs?

Scott,
It would be amazing if you entered your history that you have on your site, if it's not too much of a pain:
http://scottsdiabetes.com/scotts-a1cs/

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Permalink Reply by acidrock23 on January 22, 2011 at 6:03am

I've only entered the one I had prior to signing up. Unfortunately, I don't recall the exact dates of the tests prior to the last one although I had a string of 5.8s since I'd gotten my pump in April 08. Before that I think I had 7.2 and 7.7 which I remember was up from where I'd been before that but was sort of explainable (cf. 'Diabiography' on my page...). I'm back to the doc in February though so I'll put that in there. I sort of figured that since it is a science experiement, I didn't want to just guesstimate dates. I'm sure there are records somewhere but I don't keep them. Blood under the bridge, as it were?