Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Jun 21, 2018)
Date Submitted: Feb 18, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 19, 2018 - Jun 21, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
User-Centred-Design to improve information exchange in Diabetes Care through eHealth: results from a small-scale exploratory study
Background:
The clinical heterogeneity of patients with diabetes increases the challenge of maintaining glycemic control and therapy adherence. It is fundamental that patients are actively involved in the management of the disease in their living environments. This requires taking medicines, following a proper diet, trying to do some exercise, and being educated about and trained on the condition and its main risks.
Objective:
To build on top of User Centered Design techniques a supporting self-management system for diabetes in community settings. The aim is to show how User Centered Design techniques can be relevant to define and personalize eHealth solutions for the management of diabetes by assessing the use and compliance of the self-management system in a small-scale multicenter randomized study
Methods:
User Centered Design principles was used to involve diabetic patients and treating rpofessionals into the design, development and evaluation of a self-management system. An adaptation of the G-OD methodology was used throughout the whole process, through three main iterative cycles: scenario definition, user archetype definition and system development. Usage and compliance metrics were defined for assessing the level of engagement of patients towards their prescribed treatment and the adherence to the proposed self-management system during a four week duration study. The Wilcoxon test was chosen as a particularly conservative method, sacrificing test-power for accurateness under possibly non-parametric conditions for comparing the observed measurements for each of the weeks in the study.
Results:
A comprehensive system incorporating modules for the management of blood glucose levels, medication, food intake habits, physical activity, diabetic education and messaging was adapted to each of the two type of principal users (personas): Type 1 Diabetes user and Type 2 Diabetes User. 20 patients and 24 treating professionals enrolled the study and used the implemented system for a period of four weeks. The assessment of usage and compliance metrics was similar and did not achieve a significant difference among the two type of users, except to the medication module, which show a significant different use and compliance (P=.01)
Conclusions:
A self-management system for diabetes based on User Centered Design empowered patients to make their own decisions and help to expand the concept of Personal Health Records as an addition to the Electronic Health Records. After an initial period of time, T1DM are more prone to use less the parts of the designed app, however the use and the communications sent from the app still remain similar among T1DM and T2DM patients
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.