The prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) in the US is disproportionately high among minority women. In order to participate as partners in healthcare, DM patients need self-management education and support. Diabetes self-management (DSM) support is effective in helping DM patients make good choices and achieve clinical goals but is difficult to deliver in medical practice settings. Virtual reality technology can assist DM patient and their clinical teams with DSM support by providing effective educational tools in an engaging, learner-centered context that fosters self-efficacy and skill proficiency. Our prior work demonstrated that virtual worlds, like Second Life (SL), are suitable for supporting DSM education for patients. SL, an Internet-based virtual world, is an example of an immersive, three-dimensional environment which supports social networking and interaction with information. We now aim to enhance our curriculum using a medical group visit design to study whether the Women in Control virtual world group medical visit leads to similarly effective health and educational outcomes compared to face-to-face group medical visits.
Our aims are to conduct a randomized, controlled trial of the comparative effectiveness of a virtual world DSM group medical visit format vs. a face-to-face DSM group visit format to increase physical activity and improve glucose control among Black/African American and Hispanic women with uncontrolled DM at six month follow up, and to conduct a qualitative, ethnographic study of participant engagement with the virtual world platform during the virtual world group sessions, between group sessions, and following completion of the eight-week curriculum to characterize learners' self-directed interactions with the technology platform and assess the correlation of these interactions with DSM behaviors and diabetes control.
The prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) in the US is disproportionately high among minority women, who report low rates of physical activity, low consumption of healthy foods, and low levels of diabetes self-efficacy. For patients to become better engaged as partners in their own healthcare, they need self-management education and support. We will study the potential that virtual world technology has for expanding access to and uptake of evidence-based care with the aim of promoting wider dissemination of diabetes self-management behaviors, reducing health disparities and improving diabetes outcomes.
