title: Italian contributions to the development of continuous glucose monitoring sensors for diabetes management.
abstract: Monitoring glucose concentration in the blood is essential in the therapy of diabetes, a pathology which affects about 350 million people around the World (three million in Italy), causes more than four million deaths per year and consumes a significant portion of the budget of national health systems (10% in Italy). In the last 15 years, several sensors with different degree of invasiveness have been proposed to monitor glycemia in a quasi-continuous way (up to 1 sample/min rate) for relatively long intervals (up to 7 consecutive days). These continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) sensors have opened new scenarios to assess, off-line, the effectiveness of individual patient therapeutic plans from the retrospective analysis of glucose time-series, but have also stimulated the development of innovative on-line applications, such as hypo/hyper-glycemia alert systems and artificial pancreas closed-loop control algorithms. In this review, we illustrate some significant Italian contributions, both from industry and academia, to the growth of the CGM  sensors research area. In particular, technological, algorithmic and clinical developments performed in Italy will be discussed and put in relation with the advances obtained in the field in the wider international research community.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Via Gradenigo 6/B, 35131 Padova, Italy. gianni@dei.unipd.it
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sparacino
authors.forename: Mattia
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zanon
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Facchinetti
authors.forename: Chiara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zecchin
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Maran
authors.forename: Claudio
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cobelli
mesh_terms: D015374:Biosensing Techniques / Q000295:instrumentation*; D001786:Blood Glucose / Q000032:analysis*; D015190:Blood Glucose Self-Monitoring / Q000295:instrumentation; D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000097:blood / Q000628:therapy*; D004867:Equipment Design / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D007221:Industry; D007558:Italy
chemical_list: D001786:Blood Glucose