On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
A new formative study of an in-home full-color imaging scale offers a glimpse of the Foot Selfie’s next chapter—from early home plantar photography and smartphones to AI, co-creation, and ambient monitoring.
A new paper in BMC Health Services Research describes how we co-created a Foot Selfie app with, not for, people living with diabetes, caregivers, and clinicians in urban Lima and semi-rural Piura, Peru. Here is how the end-users redesigned remote diabetic foot surveillance to fit the rooms where it actually happens.
Ninety percent of clinicians know about the Medicare Therapeutic Shoe Benefit and nearly all recommend shoes, yet fewer than one in five eligible patients ever gets them. A new study from Ryan Crews and Carol Kurth shows the bottleneck isn't awareness. It's friction.
A new protocol paper in Sensors describes a chatbot that doses walking like a drug for patients in diabetic foot remission.
A novel inflammation-nutrition biomarker — the neutrophil percentage-to-albumin ratio (NPAR) — shows strong association with diabetic foot ulcer risk in a 1,002-patient study from Xi'an, China, reinforcing that what patients eat and how they inflame are inseparable in the diabetic foot.
A Stanford team demonstrates that a smartphone app measuring vibration perception thresholds can detect large-fiber sensory deficits in patients with diabetes — a potential advance for accessible, patient-operated neuropathy screening.
A scoping review from Kanazawa University maps 60 studies on AI-powered thermography for diabetic foot detection — and reveals a critical gap: nearly half of all studies were tested only in controlled environments, not the real world where feet actually live.
A cost-effectiveness analysis of the DIAFOS trial shows that in-shoe plantar pressure-guided custom footwear saves over €8,000 per ulcer prevented — and adherent patients push the probability of cost-effectiveness to 94%. The economic case for prevention just got stronger.
Honored to deliver the keynote at the inaugural meeting of ADFA in Paris.
A new systematic review finds that roughly one in three adults in remission after a healed diabetic foot ulcer develop a recurrent ulcer within 12 months — a risk comparable to several common cancers. Healing is the beginning of the next chapter, not the end of the story.
