The Dario, Yet Another Smartphone Blood Glucose Monitor, Plans iOS App Launch

The numbers of portable blood glucose monitors linked to smartphones are exploding, given that there are some 26 million diabetics in the U.S. alone and hundreds of millions globally. Glooko is a startup in this space. It helps diabetics to record and monitor their blood sugar levels by connecting one of 17 FDA-approved glucose meters with their smartphone. Another is iHealth Lab out of Mountain View, Calif., which has a portable Bluetooth-enabled blood glucose monitor that allows people to take a reading and have the results sync automatically to their iOS or Android device and stored in the cloud.

Now New York-based LabStyle Innovations has developed the Dario, a cloud-based, mobile health platform for diabetes and related blood glucose monitoring. It now plans to launch an iOS mobile application on December 12 in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand and will market a pocket-sized glucose meter.

The app works with the ‘all-in-one’, pocket-sized, Dario blood glucose monitoring device, which comes complete with lancet, strips and a meter that connects to a smart phone. The device will be commercially available in Europe in a soft launch during the first quarter of 2014.

You’ll also be able to link the Dario’s iOS app to any glucose monitoring device by manually feeding in the information.

Over the longer term, the platform hopes to be able to integrate with insulin delivery and other diabetes devices.

LabStyle Innovations is a public company traded under the ticker symbol DRIO which formerly raised $12 million funding.