Controlling chronic diseases is about building good habits, and to get children and teens with Type 1 diabetes into healthy routines, the method has to be fun. Dr. Jennifer Shine Dyer, a pediatric endocrinologist and app developer in Columbus, Ohio, wants to turn each of her T1D patients into a “diabetes ninja” with a new mobile game she’s building.
“The game’s focus is to create a habit in 90 days,” said Dyer, who believes that’s the amount of daily repetition needed to form habits and that building habits is the best way to engage young patients.
Dyer hasn’t come up with a name for the game yet, just the ninja concept. She discussed it briefly Feb. 29 at the Patient Engagement Symposium before HIMSS16 in Las Vegas and spoke to MedCity News this week.
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The game, as Dyer envisions it, will give patients levels of martial-arts belts for measuring blood-glucose levels, eating the right kinds of food, giving themselves insulin shots and taking other diabetes control measures. “The more belt level you have, the more tokens you have,” said Dyer, who practices at Central Ohio Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes Services and serves as chief medical advisor to mobile app developer Duet Health in Columbus.
The new app is like a “little arcade,” Dyer explained, with a variety of open-source games within the app. “We can add and be nimble with that,” said Dyer, who has enlisted engineering students at the Ohio State University to help with development over the last two years.
At the moment, Dyer manually controls who gets to go up a belt level, based on data compiled by a diabetes management platform called Diasend. Eventually, she wants to automate this function with an algorithm, and she’s waiting for the Tidepool nonprofit — featured at the recent White House Precision Medicine Initiative summit — to open an application provider interface to enable this at the individual practice level.
“I see this [app] plugging in and being an accessory to an electronic medical record,” Dyer said.
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Dyer eventually would like to commercialize the app, but first she needs to prove the efficacy and develop a business model. There’s a beta test fall planned for the fall, and Dyer said she is looking to apply for funds to hire a research assistant and to publish an academic paper with an OSU professor.
An additional goal is to create local communities, controlled by individual medical practices, for kids with Type 1 diabetes who already know each other. “I would envision opening up to a specific practice,” Dyer said. “It has to be a protected, closed space,” she added. “You don’t want any predators in there.”
