From Palm to Arm

Abstract

The number of people diagnosed with diabetes is increasing at an alarming rate. However, strong evidence shows that health information technology has improved medical outcomes, especially within the field of diabetes research.

This thesis investigates how to motivate people with diabetes to perform self-management activities with the help of a smartwatch application. The work is grounded in a literature review, discovering how people manage diabetes with smartwatches today and the lack of existing motivational features on existing solutions. As a result, a system design of a smartwatch application is presented, including a graphical user interface (UI). The system aims to manage and monitor the essential diabetes metrics: nutrition, blood glucose, and physical activity while generating motivation through goal setting. In addition, the presented system is oriented on a standalone architecture, removing the need to pair a smartphone to the smartwatch and introducing novel features for smartwatch diabetes management. Finally, a proof of concept is implemented using Android studio to solidify the systems requirements.

Furthermore, a descriptive analysis of a survey presents that among people with diabetes, simplicity is the most crucial factor in smartwatch applications. Based on this, the presented UI is evaluated according to the simplicity of other systems and the impact the motivational features have on the system’s complexity. Then, the potential of a standalone architecture for diabetes management is discussed. Finally, it is concluded that goal-setting features should be more widely used among smartwatch applications due to their low impact on the application.

The future work of the thesis is to test the system on people with diabetes. Both to evaluate the system useability scale and observe the impact goal-setting has on performing diabetes self-management. Furthermore, in this thesis, it is assumed that there is a communication channel between diabetes devices and the smartwatch. This must be further investigated with the next generation of diabetes devices.