Diabetic watch

German student Nicole Schmiedel has come up with a design for a trendy-looking wristwatch named COR that contains an innovative ultra-light insulin pump to help people with type 1 diabetes.

Inside COR, a piezo-electric transducer from the German company INVENT absorbs the energy of even the slightest movement of the person who wears it and converts it into power to drive the insulin pump.

'I got the idea for the insulin pump wristwatch when I watched a film of a little 8-year old girl with diabetes using an insulin pump and saw what she had to go through to get her daily doses of insulin,' recalled Nicole Schmiedel, an industrial design student at Braunschweig University of Art in Germany.

Many diabetics who need multiple daily insulin injections to control their blood sugar use cumbersome syringes or even bulkier equipment which limits their mobility. Few use insulin pumps or other newer techniques. Schmiedel wanted to design a system to improve the quality of life for diabetics and allow them to lead as normal a life as possible.