Assessment Center Held in UAE to Select Ambassadors from ten Operations to Support First of its Kind Live Diabetes Research Study Using mHealth Innovations.
In a bid to support the fight against diabetes, Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited (PTCL), a part of Etisalat Group, has sent the five winners of PTCL cycling championship to UAE for making their way to participate in the first GSMA mHealth Grand Tour for Diabetes awareness.
35 Etisalat employees selected from over 30,000 staff in the UAE, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Tanzania arrived in the UAE today to begin a series of physical and psychological challenges to determine who will represent the telecoms operator in a 13-day European bicycle tour to test the world’s latest innovations to help manage diabetes.
More than 150 PTCL employees volunteered for this 2100 Km long. After the event, eight will be selected to participate in the event to be staged from Brussels to Barcelona, whose goals are to raise awareness of diabetes and showcase mobile health solutions.
“PTCL is committed to employ ICT as means for socio-economic uplift and develop telecom solutions aimed at improving the quality of life”, said Syed Mazhar Hussain, PTCL Senior Executive Vice President (SEVP) Human Resources. “This passionate involvement is a reflection of the spirit and enthusiasm of PTCL employees and also represents company’s focus towards social causes and our role as responsible citizen, specially in the domain of health and societal-development”.
In the first challenge, the candidates completed eight laps of Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina circuit, and on July 3 they will undertake further physical and team assessment challenges at the operator’s Etisalat Academy training facilities in Dubai.
The event is being presented by the GSM Association, which represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, in partnership with the International Diabetes Federation European Region to raise awareness of diabetes and promote mobile technologies that can be used to fight the disease.
Riders who will be cycling the entire challenge will be invited to volunteer to help collect data in a ‘first-of-its-kind’ live clinical study focusing on the effects of multi-day exercise on glycaemia and hypoglycemic levels in people with Type 1 Diabetes and others without the disease.
The volunteers wear the Dexcom G5 continuous glucose monitor, which attaches to the skin and transmits data wirelessly over ANT+. A bio-harness will also be used to capture the heart rates of the cyclists and monitor gathering and transmitting healthcare data wirelessly to help the research in combating Diabetes. All of these devices will transmit their statistics via ANT+ both to the riders’ smartphones, enabling them to track their health and performance in real time, and to an M2M (machine-to-machine) module. The M2M module will then transmit all data over mobile broadband to the cloud, for display on a Web portal and for later analysis by the research team.
Etisalat riders were chosen from over 500 applicants from its 15 international operations, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tanzania and Sudan.
The final Etisalat team is expected to be announced on July 7. The selected riders will continue to train until the tour begins on September 5, 2013.
