The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to transform the life experiences of youth patients in the Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) community by providing an affordable, comprehensive mobile platform for monitoring health behaviors, tracking biometrics, fostering self-empathy/empowerment, and developing healthy diabetes self-management practices (DSM) through a gamified app. Adherence to DSM behaviors is an exacting issue with conventional T1D treatment and prevention regimens, though the use of features found in gaming technologies has been shown to be motivating in apps for chronic illnesses. Data-tracking applications meant for public health are believed to yield hidden trends on diet, fitness, mood, and compliance in both individuals and populations, identifying behavioral patterns that may be useful for positive behavior change. With a far-reaching and accessible intervention leveraging the motivational power of games, empathy, and social interaction, health professionals can use this intervention to encourage long-term engagement with data-tracking, which in turn creates rich data sets for tapping into the unseen trends of T1D experiences, contributing to the growing body of T1D knowledge, enriching T1D youth's quality of life, and streamline patient-provider communications in a cost-effective way that benefits the health care system as a whole.
The proposed project aims to provide a better understanding of the affordances of digital technologies in DSM, with emphases on the role of technology as a facilitator of diabetes education, DSM, patient-provider communications, emotional wellness, social and cognitive development, and positive behavior change. T1D diagnoses represent more than 175,000 youth in the United States, and despite significant headway in other areas of mobile health, many families struggle to access T1D tools that dramatically improve the quality of life and health outcomes of their children. To meet this demand, the objectives of this research begin with engineering a full-featured youth-facing prototype¯starring an empathetic virtual pet¯capable of collecting multiple streams of user data and teaching via instructional modules. Data collected during usability studies with stakeholders in the diabetes community will provide insight into effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of users, while a feasibility study also employing interviews, surveys, and think aloud protocols will offer insight into the practical use of the app in everyday life over a weeklong period. After both of these studies have been conducted, transcripts of recorded sessions and log file data will be analyzed, with the goal of improving the feasibility of extended product usage and success.
