Tailoring Type 2 Diabetes Self-Management

Description

Our research group has over the last 14 years studied and designed personalized tools to support changes in health behaviours, including those related to self-management of diabetes. Mobile phones have proven to be a helpful tool for the self-treatment of diabetes.

One way of increasing perceived usefulness, actual use of an eHealth intervention, as well as maintaining effect in the long run, is through tailoring the intervention to the individual participant. A tailored intervention is one that is adapted to the characteristics of the individual, typically based on responses to a questionnaire. Tailored health messages are in general perceived as more interesting and personally relevant, liked better, read more thoroughly, discussed more, and remembered better compared to non-tailored educational material. Personalization shows the most consistent effects of being tailored to and is consistent with self-referent encoding, that all information that we associate with ourselves, is more easily noticed, stored, and retrieved.

Goals

To research how a mobile-phone-based self-management system can be tailored to people with Type 2 diabetes, and the effects this might have on self-management, through:

• Design of a tailored self-management system for people with Type 2 diabetes delivered in a public available smartphone application (app) so that the system is perceived as useful.
• Study how a tailored self-management system can be made available for the public on an application store like Google Play and measure the effects on users.

Method

This RCT-study suggesting to test how we can recruit this group through a public available app on an application store (Google Play). We are testing various tailoring and personalization functions through the use of the application Diabetes Diary, where blood glucose-, physical activity-, nutrition- and medication data can be capture through a simple user interface.