My name is Mykola. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes last winter.
It arrived at an age where I was old enough to take it in. Did I fully understand what had happened to me and why? Partly, I think — certainly not completely. But one thing I understood exactly: I don't want to blame anyone else for it, and I don't want to sit still.
In my first week in hospital I was taught to count carbohydrates, told what I could eat and what I had better avoid, and handed a small paper booklet — a list of a thousand foods with the nutrients for each one. That surprised me. I asked whether there was an app for people with diabetes with that booklet inside. I was told there wasn't, but that I could use an ordinary calorie tracker — convenient enough, apparently.
At home I installed one. After using it for a while I realised the problem was the app itself: it counted calories, and what I needed was carbohydrates — at every meal I still had to dig the carbs out and work them out by hand, and I got it wrong more often than I would have liked. This is not a complaint about calorie trackers — they do exactly what they were built to do. Their job is counting calories and losing weight, not counting carbs and helping someone with diabetes.
That was when it clicked that the booklet from the hospital could be rebuilt as software: add a camera that reads both the plate and the numbers on my kitchen scale, and work the carbohydrates out by formula rather than by calories.
By then I already had some experience building small automations and AI assistants for Telegram and WhatsApp, so I made the first version as a bot. My father helped me with that too. It was primitive: you send a photo, the bot scans it and sends back the carbohydrates in the dish. It worked, and I started using it every day.
Once it was running, my mum pushed me to take the project further and put it in front of other people. I thought about it and decided to go all in — that became an app called DiaRoute.
It was going to be called DiaBot. But route means a path, and after a long think that felt like the better word. The app already does a great deal and helps me and many other people every day, but this is only the beginning of the path.
Right now I'm working on developing and improving DiaRoute, and a Type 2 mode is in progress.
I want to build a dose calculator too — it's the single most requested thing people expect from an app like this, and writing it is about a week's work. But the minute an app does the arithmetic behind your injection, it legally becomes a medical device. That means certification, not a toggle in settings. I'm walking that path. Until it is walked, DiaRoute stays a logbook: it records and it shows, and the dose is worked out by a person together with their doctor.
And I genuinely hope that, having managed to make my own life simpler, I can make it simpler for other people too.
— Mykola