M42 Begins Wearable Health Pilot In Abu Dhabi For Kidney Disease, Diabetes Patients

M42 has begun a 10,000-patient pilot in Abu Dhabi using wearable health data to personalise care for people with kidney disease and diabetes, in what the company says is a move towards bringing continuous monitoring into routine clinical care.

The pilot which begins immediately, involves 5,000 renal patients and 5,000 diabetes patients, M42 Group CEO Dimitris Moulavasilis told Khaleej Times.

The programme will test how data collected continuously from wearable devices can be combined with patients' clinical information to identify changes in their condition and help doctors tailor care, rather than relying only on information collected during clinic visits.

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For kidney patients, the approach could be particularly significant because people receiving haemodialysis can undergo substantial changes between treatment sessions while spending much of their time outside direct clinical supervision.

Moulavasilis said the aim was to use wearable data to understand those changes and provide more personalised care.

The Abu Dhabi pilot comes as M42 moves to expand its use of predictive technology beyond individual AI tools and into continuous monitoring of patients with chronic diseases.

M42 has already developed AI that can predict vascular-access thrombosis in haemodialysis patients approximately a week before the complication occurs. The capability was reported earlier this year, but the new pilot represents a further step towards combining such predictive systems with continuous patient-generated data.

Moulavasilis said the system can identify the signals behind its prediction, allowing doctors to understand why a patient may be at risk and intervene earlier.

The wider aim is to move from episodic care, where a patient's condition is assessed during scheduled visits, towards a model in which changes can be detected continuously.

The pilot forms part of a much broader push in Abu Dhabi to connect different types of health information.

Moulavasilis said the emirate's infrastructure, including genomics, the Abu Dhabi Biobank, the Malaffi health information system, environmental science and digital health, is creating an ecosystem in which biological and real-world data could be used together.

The Abu Dhabi Biobank, developed by the Department of Health - Abu Dhabi and M42, was inaugurated in April with capacity for up to five million biological samples and is designed to link biological samples with genomic, lifestyle and clinical data.

Moulavasilis said the combination was important not only for healthcare but also for life-sciences research, as the infrastructure could attract biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies seeking to develop new therapies and collaborate on research.

He said the greatest opportunity was in diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and metabolic disorders, which can develop for years before symptoms become apparent.

The goal, he said, was to identify risk earlier and then have a clinical pathway in place to act on it.

“Okay, you predict, so what? You need to have the clinical care pathways to treat the people,” he explained,

Abu Dhabi is already expanding those pathways in other areas, including genomics and advanced diagnostics. Moulavasilis said the health system was beginning to introduce a multi-cancer diagnostic panel following the use of liquid biopsy for prostate cancer.

The emirate is also pursuing gene-editing therapies for inherited diseases through its collaboration with Mammoth Biosciences, while its genomic infrastructure is being used for applications including pharmacogenomics and premarital screening.

Dr Asma Al Mannaei, Executive Director of Life Sciences at the Department of Health - Abu Dhabi, said the focus needed to be on translating innovation into healthcare rather than allowing technologies to remain at the research stage.

She pointed to examples of solutions developed through the Future Health platform that are already being used to tackle health problems, including technology designed to help detect cancer earlier and a small device that can help monitor mosquitoes in areas affected by infectious disease.

She also highlighted Abu Dhabi's medical command centre, which uses AI and data to predict areas likely to generate higher volumes of emergency calls and help manage emergency-service resources.

For Al Mannaei, the wider objective extends beyond reducing individual diseases to supporting healthier lives by looking at factors including where people live, what they eat and how active they are.

The approach reflects a broader shift in Abu Dhabi's health strategy towards using data continuously and combining different sources of information rather than treating each health problem in isolation.

Health officials attending the unveiling of the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit taking place at ADNEC between October 20 and 22, similarly stressed that advances in AI, genomics, clinical research and health data now need to move from innovation into implementation.

The experts argued that governments, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, technology firms and policymakers need to work together to turn those advances into practical health services.

For M42, the 10,000-patient pilot offers a test of what that shift looks like at the level of individual patients: collecting information continuously, identifying changes earlier and using those signals to adapt care before a complication becomes an emergency.

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