The recent advances of Information and Communication Technologies (IT) have transformed telemedicine into a mature field, so that the research results collected over years can be nowadays translated into clinical practice. Diabetes management represents a sort of natural field for the application of new distributed model of care, that fully exploits currently available telemedicine solutions. For example, the US Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) has recently funded the IDEATel project with a $28 million grant; IDEATel is the largest telemedicine effort ever funded by the US federal government. Also in Europe there are several projects that are testing innovative IT-based services for supporting diabetes management. Within the V framework research programme of the European Commission, about 40 projects have been devoted to home-care telemedicine applications: 8 of them dealt with the application of IT to the management of Diabetes.

The talk will be divided into two parts: in the first part, it will be given an introduction on the current status of the European research on telemedicine applications in Diabetes care; in the second part, it will be presented the M2DM project, together with the some results obtained in its clinical evaluation.