The HealthPia GlucoPack Diabetes phone: a usability study

Type I diabetes is a common chronic disease of childhood. Both the growing influence of peers and the shifting away from parental influence have been implicated as prime elements contributing to poor glycemic outcomes in adolescents. Mobile technology that can be directed towards providing self-management support and modifying potentially negative child parent interaction holds promise to improve control in adolescents with diabetes.

HealthPia, Inc. (Palisades Park, NJ) has developed a prototype system, the HealthPia GlucoPack Diabetes Monitoring System, which integrates a small blood glucose monitoring device into the battery pack of a cell phone. A pilot study used mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate user satisfaction with the integrated system, including the potential of the device to transmit self-monitoring data to a website for review and analysis by clinicians, parents, and patients.

Adolescents in our study liked the integration of the two technologies and agreed that the glucometer was easy to use and that the tool was useful in the management of their diabetes.

Future work will focus on the utilization of the diabetes phone as a component of a care delivery system for adolescents with diabetes, including involvement of the health care team and enhancement of the web services that support the use of the phone.