SBIR Phase I: Digital Self-Management Intervention for Empowering Youth with Type 1 Diabetes

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是通过提供一个经济实惠的、全面的移动平台来监测健康行为、跟踪生物特征、培养自我同情/赋权、通过游戏化应用开发健康的糖尿病自我管理实践（DSM）。对于传统的糖尿病治疗和预防方案来说，坚持DSM行为是一个严格的问题，尽管在慢性疾病应用中使用游戏技术中的功能已被证明是有激励作用的。据信，用于公共卫生的数据跟踪应用程序可以揭示个人和人群在饮食、健身、情绪和依从性方面的隐藏趋势，识别出可能有助于积极行为改变的行为模式。通过利用游戏、移情和社交互动的激励力量，医疗专业人员可以使用这种干预措施鼓励长期参与数据跟踪，从而创建丰富的数据集，用于挖掘T1D体验的未见趋势，促进T1D知识的增长，提高T1D青少年的生活质量。并以一种经济有效的方式简化患者与提供者的沟通，使整个医疗保健系统受益。拟议的项目旨在更好地了解数字技术在DSM中的应用，重点关注技术在糖尿病教育、DSM、医患沟通、情感健康、社会和认知发展以及积极行为改变方面的促进作用。在美国，T1D诊断代表了17.5万多名青少年，尽管在移动医疗的其他领域取得了重大进展，但许多家庭仍难以获得T1D工具，这些工具可以显著提高孩子的生活质量和健康结果。为了满足这一需求，本研究的目标是从设计一个面向年轻人的全功能原型开始的，这个原型由一个有同理心的虚拟宠物组成，能够收集多个用户数据流，并通过教学模块进行教学。在与糖尿病社区的利益相关者进行可用性研究期间收集的数据将提供对用户有效性、效率和满意度的见解，而可行性研究也采用访谈、调查和自言自语协议，将在为期一周的时间内提供对该应用程序在日常生活中的实际使用的见解。在完成这两项研究之后，将分析记录会话的文本和日志文件数据，目的是提高扩展产品使用和成功的可行性。

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.