“Diabetes care”: Providing advanced representation of mobile diabetes diary data to general practitioner

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of the research is to develop an application that will support diabetes management in general practice. The research solution was implied to allow general practitioner to see advanced represented data that was measured and recorded into mobile diabetes diary by patients with diabetes.

Motivation The development of mHealth applications for patients with diabetes has large variety of mobile diabetes diaries to support self-management for a better life quality. However, these kind of applications do not play substantial role in diabetes care in general practice despite the level of advanced features in such applications. The data is not in particular use by primary care professionals due to the lack of such possibility. Besides, advanced trends representation of daily measurements of blood glucose level, insulin and carbohydrates intake, and physical activity can play significant role in providing prevention and control for diabetes patients based on their personal patterns.

Methods For the research design, engineering approach was chosen. In particular, the study was based on the waterfall model of software development life cycle (SDLS). Mostly, to collect the information for the requirements and to understand medical particularity of diabetes management in general practice, such methods as interview, questionnaire and discussion were used. Participants were four medical doctors and group of technical experts who supported the development on its each step. Usability testing was performed during application prototyping and on the final software testing with users involvement. During the software testing procedure, the application showed no faults.

Results “Diabetes Care” application was developed to support diabetes management in general practice, by helping general practitioner in a more rapid and qualitative way to analyze patient’s measurements. For each type of measurements were developed statistics. As well, decision support function was embedded into statistical rules for physical activity and morning glucose levels monitoring. Color representation of the decision support function was oriented on the error minimization and saving time for the rest of the consultation procedure. During the development, the application was extended with appointments and recommendation management functionality for patients. The application was tested by medical doctors in order to see its acceptance by potential users. Overall, medical doctors expressed highly positive thoughts about the application. “Diabetes Care” was accepted as comfortable to use, understandable, and intuitive. The simplicity of use, design and the idea of development were highlighted by doctors as strong research aspects. Doctors were prone to think that with possible further extensions and consideration of legal issues, the application can improve quality of diabetes care generally.

Conclusion Application testing showed very promising results according to its medical doctors’ acceptance. The direction of the research was pointed as an innovative and showed strong interest to the application development from medical perspective. Despite the fact that exclusively two medical doctors have tested the application, the results of each testing procedure were similar. This allows the assumption that relevance of the “Diabetes Care” application should be tested and studied further with possible development in order to identify its potential positive effect on quality of provided diabetes management in general practice.