Design and Formative Evaluation of an Immersive VR Carbohydrate-Sorting Game for Diabetes Self-Management

Recognising carbohydrate content of food is an important part of diabetes self-management. This paper introduces an immersive virtual reality (VR) carbohydrate-sorting game as a design exploration aimed at supporting the cognitive skills involved in carbohydrate recognition. The design is informed by a cognitive-behavioural perspective focusing on visual categorisation, spatial estimation, and learning through feedback. An early VR prototype was developed using Unity 3D for Meta Quest 3, incorporating standardised food representations and interactive sorting tasks. Informal formative feedback from five domain experts was used to reflect on interaction flow and clarity of feedback, and to guide early design refinements. At this stage, no learning or behavioural outcomes were assessed. Future work will focus on empirical evaluation with people living with diabetes.