Diabetic E-patient Care System

Abstract

Diabetes as one of the Chronic Illness that requires extra effort in its monitoring and management to avoid the glycemic fluctuations through a patient centric medication, that requires close monitoring of the patient physical exercise, insulin intakes and eating habits. The treatments offered for type one diabetic aims to keep patients' blood glucose levels as normal as possible and to prevent health problems developing later in their life. This requires the patients to be followed by a doctor for life but most of them are culprits of inadequate patient follow up as reported by Beran report of implementing national diabetes programs in sub-Saharan Africa. Researchers and developers have created Diabetes applications that already are flooded in the free application stores but basically most of them do offer local data logging with exclusive additional features at high cost. Most of these applications are meant for users targeted in the developed world context. Through the study, a logging application on an Android Smartphone was designed and developed for Children with Type One diabetes for a developing world context to help them in diabetes selfmanagement. Questionnaire survey was done with nine respondents that was used to represent the population on pilot. A modified version of the Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities was used to investigate the changes related to the diabetes self-management and the user satisfaction. The survey results for the user satisfaction showed that 81.7% of subjects had positive changes on their clinical course of diabetes self-management after using the application 87.2% of the users were satisfied with the User Interface, Application Structure and supported functionalities of the application. Furthermore, 96.7% of the users stated that the application was efficient in use on logging the data. This study showed that improvement in diabetes self-management activities is greater when user satisfaction is high. In addition, the study showed a positive effect on diabetes self-management and high level of user satisfaction both which plays a big role for improvement on the patients Quality of Life.