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Teen's diabetes app gets FDA clearance
FOX 5 talked to a teen five years ago about a diabetes app in production. Now, the app has received FDA clearance.
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. - The journey to help children with Type 1 diabetes was even harder than one Montgomery County teen thought it would be.
The backstory:
Back in 2020, then 13-year-old Drew Mendelow was hospitalized at Children’s National and diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. He learned he’d need an app to keep track of things like insulin doses and blood sugar, but he couldn’t find the right one.
"I taught myself to code games over the summer, and I said an app’s not too far off. So, from the day I got home from the hospital, I started working on my own app," Mendelow said at the time.
The T1D1 app was born.
In time, more than 45,000 people downloaded it. Mendelow heard rave reviews. That is, until he said T1D1 had to be pulled from app stores because it didn’t have Food and Drug Administration clearance, which, among other things, requires a ton of documentation and what’s called a human factor study.
"Actually, some of your viewers from the last story were very kind enough to donate to the cause, and this funding was super helpful for us to hire a consultant and write the entire protocol for this human factor study," Mendelow, now a college student at Georgia Tech, told Fox 5 Thursday. He got some help from a private medical company as well.
"I really want to just make the lives even a little bit easier for the newly diagnosed," he added.
Now, five years after the journey began, T1D1 is still free for users, it got FDA clearance, and it’s back in app stores as of this month.
What's next:
Mendelow said his work on the app is far from finished. He'd still like to translate the app into different languages, get it approved in different countries, and develop new features as well.
What you can do:
To learn more about the T1D1 app – or to donate to help Mendelow keep it going – you can find more information here.