Broadband-Based Television Portal for Diabetes Self-Care

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Diabetes is one of the most costly and destructive chronic diseases in the U.S. Each year it accounts for over $130 billion in direct medical and other indirect costs, and contributes to the death of over 200,000 people. Since diabetes is more prevalent in older people, it is expected to grow as a problem with the aging of the U.S. population. It is important to find new approaches to keeping people with diabetes healthy in order to reduce the growing medical, economic and social toll of this disease. One important way to do so is to support the medical self-care activities of people living with diabetes. The long-term objectives of this project is to commercialize a technology platform developed by BL Healthcare, Inc. that can bring together three important functions of diabetes self-care-health status monitoring and reporting, patient education, and communication with health care providers-on a standard television. By using a broadband-based technology, this technology platform can provide a sophisticated level of support for disease self-care activities of persons with diabetes, while doing so at substantially less cost than an equivalent existing approach. The platform is designed to be easy to use with a simple remote control. The graphic interface is able to deliver information-rich multimedia education to the television set from a remote server without needing a PC. The "TV friendly" format helps overcome literacy barriers. In this project, the project team will first develop a set of software for an already-developed interface so that wireless monitoring of vital signs, interactive multimedia patient education content, and electronic communications can be integrated onto a standard television. This "self-care portal" for diabetes will be then be made navigable with a simple remote control. The completed platform will be tested in 24 persons with type II diabetes over a 90-day period to evaluate the subjects' assessment of the usability and usefulness of this portal. The study will also compare study subjects' changes in understanding about diabetes and its management with a control group to see if this approach can improve patients' level of understanding of diabetes self-care.