University Medical Center Berlin
Who is Charité?
Based in Berlin, Charité – University Medical Center is the largest university hospital in Europe. We combine cutting-edge medicine and innovative medical research with truly patient-oriented treatment. Founded over 300 years ago, Charité is the joint medical faculty of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, spanning four campuses with over 100 different Departments and Institutes across 17 Charité Centers. At Charité, approximately 5,700 researchers are actively engaged in the development of pioneering innovations in the field of medicine, working across 1,000 projects and being committed to the highest standards of quality and sustainability.
Charité’s Role in AI-DAPT
Within AI-DAPT, Charité leads Demonstrator 1, the Health Pilot: a flagship use case that exemplifies the project’s core ambition of bringing trustworthy, science-guided AI into real clinical practice.
Diabetes mellitus is a global health challenge requiring continuous monitoring of blood glucose levels. Traditional methods are invasive and burdensome for patients. The AI-DAPT project addresses this issue by designing a non-invasive glucose monitoring system using AI-assisted analysis of photoplethysmography (PPG) curves. Instead of finger-prick blood tests, the goal is to detect and predict glucose levels through data collected passively by a smartwatch, making continuous diabetes monitoring more accessible, comfortable, and scalable.
AI-DAPT’s Health Pilot integrates wearable PPG sensors with advanced AI models to enable accurate, continuous, and non-invasive blood glucose estimation, improving daily diabetes management without discomfort.
Generating Clinical-Grade Data
A critical part of Charité’s contribution is not just validating AI models, but actively generating the high-quality clinical data those models depend on. A new dataset with PPG metrics, motion data, and blood glucose levels, including both diabetic and non-diabetic individuals is planned to be generated by Charité as the outcome of a new clinical study, with support and equipment from partner MCS Data Labs.
This dataset is central to the entire health pipeline. It reflects AI-DAPT’s data-centric philosophy: before you can train a trustworthy AI model, you need representative, carefully curated, ethically collected data. Charité brings both the clinical infrastructure and the medical domain expertise to make this happen in a rigorous, patient-safe way.
Why It Matters And Looking Ahead
Non-invasive glucose monitoring is one of the most sought-after breakthroughs in modern medicine. If AI-DAPT’s approach succeeds, the impact goes far beyond convenience: it could lower barriers to diabetes diagnosis and management, enable earlier intervention for at-risk populations, and reduce the burden on patients who currently depend on daily invasive tests.
For Charité – University Medical Center Berlin, AI-DAPT is more than a research project. It is an opportunity to contribute to a better management and diagnostic of diabetes and a possibility to shape the future medicine by enabling an easy and non-invasive glucose prediction practical for everyone.
Key Personnel
Prof. Dr. Andreas F.H. Pfeiffer is Senior-Professor of Internal Medicine at Charité – University Medical Center Berlin, Clinic for Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases. He specializes in endocrinology, diabetes and nutritional medicine. He was the long-time director of the Clinic for Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases and head of the Department Clinical Nutrition of the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE) Potsdam-Rehbrücke.
Marta Csanalosi is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate in nutritional sciences at Charité – University Medical Center Berlin, Clinic for Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases. She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics, with a specialization in Metabolism and Clinical Nutrition, from the university of Barcelona. Her research interest includes human nutrition and dietetics, type 2 diabetes, protein metabolism, obesity and digital health technology.
Antonia Zumblick is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate in medical sciences at Charité – University Medical Center Berlin, Clinic for Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and a Master’s degree from the University of Potsdam, both in nutritional science. Her research interest includes nutrition, type 2 diabetes, diabetes remission, proteomics, obesity and glucose monitoring.