Technologies in Diabetes–the Seventh ATTD Yearbook

The first ATTD yearbook was presented at the third Advanced Technologies and Treatments for Diabetes (ATTD) meeting that took place in February 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and it has been published every year since then. It is impressive to compare the hopes and dreams of the technologies in development from 2010 to the current book. The field of diabetes technologies has advanced tremendously with new devices for insulin delivery, glucose measurements, algorithms of closed-loop, advisors for caregivers and patients, tools for data analysis, and applications for smartphones.

New trends in the innovative treatment of diabetes reflect the need to transfer most of the diabetes management from the medical teams to the patients themselves and/or their families and caregivers. It is obvious that with the increasing number of patients with diabetes all over the world, there is no chance that enough well-trained medical team members (physicians, nurse educators, dietitians, and technicians) will be available to advise patients frequently enough. While the association between good metabolic control and prevention of chronic complications had been documented in prospective randomized studies, most registries in the world demonstrated poor metabolic outcome in real-life situations. The difference between the medical need and the availability of medical resources, combined with the fact that diabetes is a chronic disease managed by patients in their own environments, will lead to a change in the way we practice medicine today. Future diabetes management will be mainly based on the abilities of the new technologies to capture data, analyze them, and tailor a specific therapy recommendation to each individual patient on a regular daily basis.

This seventh ATTD Yearbook reflects the recent innovations in the treatment of diabetes, combining a selection of the most relevant published data from the very broad field of diabetes with short key leaders' opinions. It goes along with the ATTD meetings, which provide an open platform for scientists, clinicians, engineers, investors, industries, and regulatory bodies with the opportunity to interact and join forces for bringing the most advanced technologies and therapies to the people with diabetes in the shortest possible time.

We would like to thank our coauthors for their hard work and dedication to writing their chapters. We appreciate their most valuable contribution to the success of this central ATTD mission.