Massachusetts teen with Type 1 diabetes wins national award for app helping patients

A Newton teenager has been living with type 1 diabetes since he was 17 months old. He's the first to admit he's not always living with the disease, and he just won a national competition for an app he created, which is powered by AI. The goal is to make life more manageable for people living with diabetes. Diabetics spend hours of their day just worrying about the diabetes itself. It takes away their time to live. Aaron Prager knows something about that. He was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was a toddler. One of my inspirations for the app is I wanted to give back diabetics as much of the time of the day they have to live as possible. The app is called Boost T1D. I'd describe it as like a diabetes management platform that combines the technical aspect of taking care of diabetes with the psychological aspect of taking care of it. Now a rising senior in high school, he started building the app a couple of years ago. So 204 is your blood sugar, basals, insulin, carbohydrates, which is all just different things that a diabetic has to worry about. And then the next steps is how you change it. But we are not allowed to say how you change it, so it basically just says that, think about this, it shows you the pattern. Another tool helps users get quick and more accurate assessments of different foods. We have the food analysis feature, where you can take a photo from your camera of food. It'll tell you approximately how many carbs there are in the food, and then based off of that and the diabetic-specific insulin doses. While the app itself is impressive, especially for a teenager to create, that's only half the story. Prager recently won the Congressional App Challenge, beating out 14,000 students from around the country to take the top prize. He just announced on stage who won, so that was teeth-chattering though. It was a triumphant moment for a young man who's used to overcoming challenges. Diabetes has not stopped him from becoming an award-winning ballroom dancer. His plan is to keep moving to the music and refining Boost T1D. I think the main thing for me is to promote the app, because I've seen how helpful it is for me and my friends, and I want it to be helpful for more people than it is right now. Now the app is also trying to create community connections for people with diabetes. A buddy system is being put in place to link people who are newly diagnosed with those who have been navigating it for a while. The app is free and available on the Apple App Store.